 My name is Nidhi and I'm the co-founder and CEO of podcast where a predictive analytics company we predict cargo flows from one place to the other for logistics companies and shipping companies and we use machine learning and AI for this. My background has been in the logistics industry I worked for DHL for the last 10 years in Singapore but all my roles were Asia related so business roles management consulting business development and strategy and I built this company with my co-founder who has his expertise in machine learning and product development and he has a PhD in that space. So yeah we're also hiring we're hiring for data science and software developers so later on if you're interested happy to talk about it. I thought from a business perspective you know what what can I talk about for developers or data scientists in this room and I think what I deal with with my team on a daily basis is connecting what the customer is asking for with what we are building and being that link in in the middle and we have internal discussions and team sessions where we try to get the you know the technical guys to think about what they are hearing from the customer from that one meeting that they have or from the product and feature that they're developing what are they understanding from the customer's perspective and I think that is crucial to build a successful company so that's what I can share some insights on. So first question from my side to you is what do you think is the number one reason why reason why companies fail especially startups sorry finance yeah so that's the answer I think finance yeah I mean investment and funds are critical to pay to survive but the the main reason why companies don't work out even if they get funding is because they don't understand what the customer really wanted so there's no market need for what they're building and I think as technical people we're really proud of what we are building right like we think this is the best thing possible this is the greatest feature that I've developed this is the best machine learning algorithm it's so accurate but does the customer really want it and a lot of times we think that if I need it everyone else will need it let me just build it and customers will come and that's not true so if you think about it like in terms of the product the poor product is much lower than what you think in terms of the market so it's really about understanding what we are doing and how is that fitting into the overall vision and objective of the company because if there's no customer the company is not going to survive and what you're building no one's going to buy that so there's no point in doing it so you know like someone said the user and the customer demand is like the north star so that's what you have to look at or constantly have it at the back of your mind while you're building and this is not just true for the whole company or the whole product but for every single part of technology that you're working on I think that is critical so on a day to day basis you have to really think about it so one of the products that I think all of us love and use is an iPhone right so Apple is really I see some smiles so maybe some people use Android but you know this is what Steve Jobs said so he said that you start with a customer experience and then you build something you can't start with the technology and then hope that there's going to be a buyer for that technology so if you think about whatever Apple has built it has not been the first company to do it it has followed the second mover advantage policy iPhone was not the first phone what Apple did really well is it really thought about what the consumer is liking about a phone a mobile phone what can I change about this experience of product and how can I make this better what the customer really wants so there is a whole lot of R&D and a whole lot of technology which is superior maybe to a lot of its competitors but it's really about going at the customer first before you start building all of that so that I think is is really critical in terms of having that customer first mindset in what we're doing so I have some examples in terms of how we can use it in our daily practice so is there anyone who's a UI UX designer here okay so I mean I'm from a more business background and I thought I'll just create a wireframe and I'll send it to a developer and that's about it I know exactly what the customer wants and I'll that that's what I think you know we should build but I recently sort of figured out that the UI UX design process is is very very critical to how your product should actually look and whether it satisfies the customer experience and the way customers use it because it's really asked the question okay how are you going to use this you know it goes step by step what are you really going to click from here what do you expect to see what is the do you need this button or not do you see this data or not on the screen and a lot of that like this example is from Shopee's app so the before and after you know it just visually it's a lot cleaner it's a lot you know focused so you know you just have to go through that process of understanding what your customer wants so that's just from a UI UX perspective but in general it's true for every single thing that we are doing and there's a lot of ways how we can get that feedback from customers so there are user interviews that we can do in corporate environments there's things like net promoter score that's mentioned here where a customer asked are you going to recommend us to any other customer and that's a very strong signal whether they like your product or company or not so that's how net score is calculated are you going to be a promoter for us or not so there's a lot of mechanisms you can have in the company to get customer feedback the other thing that's interesting is just to get data and then to do that analytics and data science behind it to really figure out if the customer is actually using what you're saying so Google analytics could be one I think this is interesting because there was a time when fidget spinners were a rage especially in the US you know they were because I'm from shipping a logistic there were containers full of fidget spinners which were being sent from China to the US and I don't know what people were doing with it but that was a rage and you can see that spike so if a company now wants to develop a fidget spinner they're not going to get that spike suddenly because of that you know there there needs to be data to show that the customer is actually requiring that and another another thing that I really like is win loss reviews so every time a customer is won or a customer is lost in the company what I think really makes sense is to get the whole team including the technical guys which is sort of in a meeting and try and figure out why did we actually win this customer why did we lose this customer because they might be like one little feature that we that we thought that the customer wanted which you know any developer could have built very easily but we did not really think about what the customer really wanted so it's always good to after you win or lose a customer take stock of what what have we learned from this and how as a team including the technical people we can do this better the product better so you know this all the things all the tips are really not just for the company but for every single feature or every single machine learning algorithm that you're building and if we don't do that right two things can happen one is that we lose the customer we don't get that right customer experience and it's really expensive to lose a customer for a startup especially it's much easier to sort of gain the customer and retain the customer rather than to manage a lot of churn and secondly as developers or as dear scientists we have to do the work again right so that we waste a lot of innovation dollars we waste a lot of time and effort and redo all the work that that we did because it was not required by the customer. I'm going to notice that this is different from being agile of course we want to be agile we don't want to build everything and then not think about iteration so this is different from the iteration process this is really about even the first thing that we build we need to have the customer in mind before we start building it it can obviously go through multiple iterations so now that we have spoken with our customers we understand what they want we have a list of features what do we do next sorry plan so usually what happens is when you talk to customers you have a long list of features that the customer is going to tell you so it's really it's really important to plan and to prioritize what features you have so simple things like I don't know in team meetings do you have a prioritization you might have tasks on Trello or something and you know even that list of tasks on Trello for that week or that day there needs to be some kind of prioritization on what needs to be done first and you know simple things about how much effort does the staff take or how much impact is it going to bring and stuff like that HubSpot actually has this interesting way of prioritization they say that the customer features or customer things come first then come things that the team is interested in the team priorities come next and any individual priorities come after that and that's sort of they're one of their values in in a code of conduct book that they have so that's interesting by combinator partner he said when you try to think about features that you're building focus on you know sort of those 10 percent which will get you you know 90 percent of the the impact so the lower the effort but the maximum the impact is what you should be focusing on so less is sometimes more so really plan prioritize go through all those features maybe with you know with your team and think about where you where you should spend your time on really okay so now we have the we've spoken with the customers we've we know what features to build and we've built it and we've got a customer is that it what comes next more features again more customers um so the point I wanted to make here is that um you know the entire customer journey is where you know each of us as a technical person is involved in every touch point to the customer matters you know so sort of the first phase where we're hunting for a customer we're pitching we're trying to get a subscription for the customer or getting them to buy it's sort of like dating you know so you need to make a good impression and once you get the customer on board then it's a marriage you can't just stop thinking about that person anymore saying I'm going to go after my next customer now so you have to try to retain it you have to work on that relationship you have to think about how we can expand from this customer so in in startups there's this whole concept of land and expand you know and that's what investors like that's what anyone wants that you spend little dollars um with the same customers and get more revenue with them so um what I've tried to say here is that through every every process in the journey there are things that all of us technical people could do so in terms of the hunting yes it is a salesperson job you know the sales guy is the one going out there finding customers what can the rest of us do um comes back to our profiles you know the you know writing a blog or having that you know the the customer might want to see who are the people working in this company what kind of profiles do they have you know just having an updated LinkedIn or word of mouth is the best way to get customers so when we go out and we say we work for this company and this is what we do and this is what we like about it that's the best way how we can get customers um so everyone sort of is a salesperson um and that's something we should not forget um then in terms of pitching a lot of times the salesperson might not be the best person to do the demo of course that's what his role is but a lot of times there must be a technical person who could support the salesperson and that that's where we can play another role as well um in terms of subscription once we get the customer again the win loss reviews that I talked about and I think if this is something you can initiate in your company even I think that sort of brings the whole team together and gets all of the team members aligned on what gets us customers and focused on what we're doing um the other thing we try to do is have a technical lead per customer so not just a customer you know sort of salesperson but a success lead from a technical perspective so that if there are any issues about that customer that's the guy or girl who's focusing on that particular customer um and then it's about retaining the customer figuring out what they're liking about the product what they're not liking really fixing their issues as soon as possible um not again forgetting about them and going after your new customers but really thinking how do we get them to stay with us um and then expanding with them in terms of more products more users uh or more volume that they're spending so you know like if you're using a product every single touch point you have with that particular company or product is what you remember um if the customer service guy did not really respond to your call um you know the email that you got from the customer got from the company is not really interesting or not really nice or polite so everything that we do matters every meeting that we attend with the customer every phone call that we take with the customer we need to be planned um even from a tech perspective um so towards the tail end it was all about retention right so whose job is it to retain the customer everyone um I have two examples here of companies um who deliberately put the retention yes amongst everyone but specifically amongst the technical teams so there's kayak what they did they had a red telephone line in the middle of the floor where the technical guys were the developers were sitting and uh every customer sort of query used to come to the to that call uh to that phone so the developers were the one picking that up and hearing what the customer's problem is the first time you hear okay this this feature is not working or this bug is is hitting when I am opening this website you're like okay fine whatever let's let's focus on what we're building the the second or the third time the same issue comes up from different customers the developer would stop what they're doing focus on fixing that issue for the customer and they really started to think what is the customer getting stopped at and that's real that's what they do um fresh desk against same policy it is a customer support support company so every single technical person or every single business person even the CEO um is a customer support person in the company um and what they realized is that the developers started figuring out that the features they've developed the customer is actually using them for something else or you know they they they started looking at them differently so they started understanding why the customer using our product and how are they using our product and that's very important again it's about getting that customer feedback fixing the issues and trying to retain the customer so customer issues should take priority over every single fancy new feature that you're building and um you know 90 percent of the customers would buy your service again because of the customer service that you bring um so i have five simple rules for driving uh customer driven driven software development the first thing is that we should start thinking about how we can get involved in the customer support maybe two times a month um that's maybe not a lot um and that applies to every single sort of level in the company even to the leadership team um every single person needs to talk to the customer and hear what the problems are um so customer request needs to be handled ASAP and um you know every time when you're prioritizing what you are doing or creating your Trello plan or your sprints think about what the customer's requests are um a lot of times in sort of product meetings there's no one from a customer perspective involved so i think that's something that as the companies grow larger we should think about getting a customer success person or a customer representative into those product meetings so that you know that person is able to bring some feedback about whether this sprint is actually making sense from a customer perspective or not um and then whenever you're working on features think about what's the fact that this feature is going to bring um and also will it help to keep the customer or make the customer successful for our company so simple things that i think all of us as technical people need to think about while we're developing the magical code that we are thank you