Product

How Does Google Maps Know Traffic Conditions In Realtime?

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When I was in Germany in the early 2000s, all my questions about distance would receive answers in terms of time. That too, under two conditions, namely, without traffic and with traffic. For example, if I asked a customer, “how far is your office from Munich airport”, the typical answer would be, “one and a … Read more

Why Does Cross Selling Fail?

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In my last post on cross-selling entitled Cross Selling Is Hard, we had seen several cross-selling flops by majors. In each case, a company that is wildly successful in one product category attempts to cross-sell a new product to its existing customers and achieves very little success. In some cases, the lack of success is … Read more

Why Two Factor Authentication Is A “Conversion Killer” & “Blood Pressure Booster”

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Any digital payment goes through a long and tortuous value chain comprising multiple entities. If we take credit card as an example, the entities include Consumer (e.g. You), Merchant (e.g. Amazon, DMART), Issuer (the bank that issues the card and enables the Consumer to make card payments e.g. Citi), Acquirer (the bank that supplies the … Read more

Why Banks Will Never Catch Up With Fintechs On UX

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Top 6 US banks posted a trillion dollars in profits in the last 10 years. "Top 6 Banks In USA Earn $1 Trillion In Profits In Last 10 Years" ~ https://t.co/coy2mSvu3C via @maxabelson @business .That's the same period when fintech was supposed to disrupt dinosaur banks. #Disruption #Shisruption #Banking #FinServ pic.twitter.com/kjZfCkqSbC — Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) … Read more

Better A Digital Colonizer Than Digital Colony Be!

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Of late, there’s a lot of concern in the public discourse that India is becoming a digital colony of the West. If this concern is valid, we have ourselves to blame for letting India become a digital colony. What’s worse, we’ve been doing this for ages and never seem to learn from past mistakes. I … Read more

Credit Card Versus Debit Card / UPI / A2A

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Credit Card and Debit Card are both “cards”. Both are digital payment methods. Both are issued by banks. Both of them work on card rails owned by Visa, MasterCard, China Union Pay, RuPay and other card networks. Because of these similarities, many people tend to believe that there’s no difference between credit and debit cards. … Read more

Outflanking Incumbent Products With AHA Moments

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One of the chief ways in which we help software companies is by introducing “aha” moments in their new products. It’s almost not necessary to define “aha” moments. The term is quite self-explanatory. We see them all around us. A few “aha” moments that come readily to my mind are: Google Assistant: Google Assistant is … Read more

When Upgrades Turn Out To Be Downgrades

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In Latest Is Not Greatest, I covered four products whose new versions have omitted key features from their older versions. Microsoft Windows Lenovo Laptop Apple iPhone ATM In this post, I’ll speculate on the causes of the “latest is not greatest” trend and how users can cope with it if their upgrades turn out to … Read more