Business Blog | Jey Geethan

Business Blog of Jey Geethan. Here, Jey Geethan writes articles about business, work, productivity and success. In short, Jey Geethan is an author, entrepreneur, and LiveAwesomeness' founder.

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In 2020, software development is one of the major industries which provides millions of jobs. And also this is one of the industry where there are various types of employment such as:

  • Full-time jobs
  • Contract jobs
  • Freelancing jobs
  • Part-time jobs
  • Remote jobs

In fact, if you look at the statistics, this industry is poised to grow even further. According to Slashdata, it's expected to reach 45 million developers by 2030.

Year
Number of Software Developers in millions
2018
23.9
2019
26.4
2023
27.7
2024
28.7
2030
45

One of the main problems for this industry is having the workforce motivated enough to do extraordinary work and amazing work. The reason I say this is those software developers when they put their heart and soul into the work, they can change worlds and build really impactful things like Google Maps (that came out of a hobby project in Google), Slack (was built as an internal tool). There are many such examples from our history. But to keep them occupied and make them bend the universe, we need really good managers who are not only encouraging but also great at identifying the problems and coming up with solutions for their reports.

I am going to talk about one of the important aspects of managing a group of software developers - 1 on 1s. 1 on 1s are meetings between their managers and their reports in which both the parties share their thoughts, ideas, and concerns. Most organizations have these meetings regularly. But some of the organizations do not have a culture of such meetings. If your organization is one of them, pls ensure that you have a word with your boss/manager and create a regular 1 on 1 meeting setup.

As a manager, it's your responsibility that 1 on 1s are effective and help your reports. I want to talk about a few of the things that make this process really effective.

Always Schedule A Meeting

Meetings that are not in the calendar do not usually happen and those meetings are ad-hoc and don't have the advantages of having the meeting scheduled prior. Some of the advantages of having prior scheduled meetings:

  • Both of them are aware when the meeting will happen and how long so that they can plan their actual work around it
  • Planned meetings have an option to have an agenda
  • Scheduled meetings are better to ensure that the reports have their fair share of time with their busy managers

Bonus: Always have a repeating event so that you can meet with your reports very regularly.

Have an Agenda

Most of the 1 on 1s do not have an agenda. The data I surveyed, showed that folks talked about the recent activities that happened a few days or weeks ago and miss out on the larger and more important issues. The best advice I can give you is to have a running journal for each one of your reports and note down points during daily work if certain things need to be discussed in your regular 1 on 1s. I would also suggest that if the issues are important, it's better to schedule a meeting as soon as possible and discuss them. The agenda is key to a productive meeting.

Talk about Career Plans

Your 1 on 1s need not be about the work that you are doing immediately. It can also be about the person's career and where she/he wants to go in a few years. It's better to discuss these very early on and have further discussions on these lines. As their manager, you should know the answer to these questions:

  • What do they want to do with their career in 1,2,3,5 years
  • What is their most important interest when it comes to software development
  • What areas should they improve to match their 5-year career plan
  • What is the best plan of action for each individual based on their learning capacity and skillset

So your meetings are supposed to help them come up with a career plan and help them guide there.

Do not convert your 1 on 1s into Status Updates

Most managers do this mistake and the regular one on one meetings become status update meetings. It shouldn't be this way. You can always come to know of the status updates via various means, but 1 on 1 is a kind of sacred time. Talk about their aspirations, career plans, and more. It's never a good time to discuss status updates and if this is happening frequently, the problem is somewhere else. You need to figure out a solution for making status updates happening seamlessly and without obstacles. May be more effective standups?

Have a list of Action Items after the meeting

Meetings without action items are equal to not having the meeting. Any meeting where serious issues were discussed will have a few action items that need to be done over the next couple of days/weeks/months. It's better to write them down and assign them to the respective owners. Managers can also have action items. So it's better to write them down and leave an email stating them. It also becomes easier for you to follow up once the meetings are over and the time for the next scheduled meeting comes along (can also be thought as goals till the next meet)

Longer meetings are good, but reschedule if necessary

Sometimes the meetings can go for a longer time than scheduled due to many reasons. From what I have understood, though these may look at that time to be really good, it may have other known impacts. It's always better to schedule follow up meetings and continue the discussions further on. This helps both the parties to understand more and come back with more prepared thoughts for further discussions.

These are my precious thoughts about 1 on 1s and I encourage all engineering leaders to incorporate these in their work. Share with me about your thoughts and experiences regarding 1 on 1s.

Text me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Website.

Dear Inner Circle Friends,



I know how you have been listening to me on productivity hacks and on improving your work-life balance. Today I have something to confess. I recently fell into a bad habit of wasting time and money. The habit formed when I started listening to business news and started reading articles related to stock markets. Then I fell into the trap of checking these websites very often and wasting time reading articles too many times a day.

I clocked my time wasted to be around 2 hours per day which was not I wanted exactly. I wanted to put a stop to this shitty behavior and get my time back. What did I do?

The solution that I came up with is what I have written below.

Solution 1 - Use a chrome plugin available in your chrome marketplace

The famous chrome plugin seems to be Block Site to accomplish the same is (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-site-website-blocke/eiimnmioipafcokbfikbljfdeojpcgbh).

All you have to do is:

  1. Add the chrome plugin by visiting the website above
  2. The icon appears next to the url bar in the chrome. 
  3. Visit the website you can to block and click on the red icon to start blocking the website.

This works like magic and there is an option to sync between android too.

Solution 2 - Use your own local chrome plugin (I chose this)

I wrote a simple script for the chrome plugin and this script blocks the websites you mention. I have put it as open source for others to use. The source is here: https://github.com/gten/productivity-increaser-chrome-block

You can download the files and add the chrome from your local machine to start blocking the websites given in the background.js.

This might seem a little advanced but for those who want to customize the script, this might be a great answer. For others, looking for simple solutions, choose the first solution.

Solution 3 - Rewrite your /etc/hosts

All nix machines like MacOS, Linux, Ubuntu have a hosts files to check for ip addresses related to the domain urls. If you overwrite them, you can point the websites you want blocked to go local ip like 127.0.0.1 which will inherently stop you from visiting these websites.


Thanks for reading this article. I hope I made a little change in your daily productivity and please leave a comment if you want to share something or ask me something.

Text me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Website.

Introduction

Why am I talking about the Lead Response Times? Because I have been there and done that. I ran a business and now I am promoting my books and other written materials in my website. I have a website that I also run for publishing my messages across my fans and subscribers. I came to understand that replying promptly to your leads or messages has a great impact on building your brand, trust and loyalty.

Is Response Time Really Important?

There is a HBR study that says that online leads that are left for more than 1 hour without replying become stale. Read it here - https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads

HBR study says that the sales reps are likely to have meaningful conversations seven times more if they reply within the first hour. One of the best aspects a probable customer will likely to remember is a meaningful conversation and that helps when it happens with the first hour of contact.

How to Increase the Responsiveness?

The first step is to identify and collect all the incoming leads into a single place which can then be picked up by the sales agents. This is where the lead response management system will come in handy. There are multitude of software that help you achieve this. But ideally pick something that is less costly and easy to use. If you want, I can review a few of them since I have used many of these in own experiences. 

The second step is to create a workflow by which you can assign these leads into specific groups of agents. This is usually done by way of matching the skills of the agents with the query that has come in.

There are couple of terms that you should be aware of:

Lead Created Time - the date and time a contact filled out a webform and submitted it

First Attempt Time - the time at which the sales agent tries to connect with the contact

First Contact Time - the time at which the sales agent makes a successful connect with the contact

First Qualification Time - the time at which the contact becomes qualified 

By keeping a note of these metrics in your system, you can identify if you are building for a team of professionals who are helping to make that first contact within the first hour.

Don't let the Leads go Cold

The trick is to maintain that customer interest and keep it going as soon as possible. I think most companies are not doing that as of now.

Talk to me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Website.


Basic Support or Unnecessary Support?

Back in the day, when I was running my own startup, I had this fear of missing out on important meetings and I would make sure that I block my calendars with enough of them to ensure that I was on top of everything. In my opinion, this is a basic requirement any executive would have. Comparing this to the customer mindset, there is a very simple yet important requirement that customers want to know any updates to their service or product and how it impacts them at any given moment.

Customer Acquisition is Important. But Retention?

I would like to continue by telling a story that happened to me a few months back. I wanted to commute and I had gotten tired of the two popular cab services in Chennai. I wanted to try something new and got hold of another service provide who was a new entrant to the market. I had started to like their service and was wondering if I could switch completely to them and make my life easier. This is when the following incident happened.

Why is Customer Retention is at the Core of a Business?

Every business tries to optimize their CLV (customer lifetime value) and its CAC (customer acquisition cost) to enable them to get more revenues. On a simpler note, by investing in the CAC, the business gets to have a go at the CLV the customer provides the business. By trying to increase the CLV (rate of purchase and margin of each purchase), a business can increase their gross margin. Though the calculations are simple, the execution of this is always a problem because there are lots of complexities like support, customer happiness, quality of the service/product, price comes into play. These all affect the rate at which the customer purchases again (frequency) and also the amount of each purchase. So, a business has to make more efforts to retain the customer so that the CLV doesn’t get affected by its other functions.

What happened to Me & My Story?

So going back to my story, I booked a cab using their mobile app and I was doing my usual work while the cab arrived. This commute is important because I wanted to reach the meeting at a time before and be ready as always. While I got immersed in my laptop, I had completely forgotten about the cab booking and I was too into the work where I needed to complete a document. Right then, the phone rang and I put the call on speaker and was about to talk to the driver who I thought might have called asking for directions or location. But I was surprised that the call was from their support center and they said that the driver’s location is not moving and he was unreachable and wanted to confirm with me whether to book another driver or find alternatives. I was pleasantly surprised that they had brought up this problem to me directly and wanted to check if the problem could be solved. Even though I went ahead and cancelled the booking and got into an auto on the road, if they had not informed me of the problem, I would have never made the alternative arrangements myself. This I found to be of great importance to me as a customer and made me feel a little bit more safer with them and their support.

Proactive Support

The proactiveness of the above incident really made an impact and helped to get the impression that they really care about. I wanted to write about this very event with one aim - to talk about how caring for your customers helps them in the most fascinating way and helps businesses grow and retain their customer easily. Be proactive, be awesome.

Talk to me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Website.

Introduction

Getting a quick win is hard because it needs multiple ideologies and practices to come together. It would ideally be a combination of least time to support the customer and to help the customer at the right point of their journey. By helping our customers to do the above, we help our products to grow steadily. Microservices can be likened to fast acting customer support, where we are building things in a faster and leaner way. Let’s talk about why an organization would need microservices in the first place.

Why Microservices?

As a first hand believer of picking the right tools for the right jobs, I would caution the reader that Microservices might not be a good fit for all organizations. You will have to take a stock of the needs, the pros and cons of an architecture style and then take a decision to either migrate or start building through the specific architecture. Microservices do help in a few things as the organization grows and it helps the product to be modularized so that it can developed independent of others.

Microservices is a style of architecture where instead of building a product as a single service, it is split into multiple sub modules and are developed as individual services. These smaller services are developed individually by different teams in different repositories without any need for a single big team to be present. Each service has a well-defined role and it doesn’t creep into other services. Each service can communicate with each other through APIs or any messaging channel.







The advantage is that the each microservice can be scaled, deployed, updated independently. The teams work fairly independent on their services and this helps them to move faster wherever possible.

What does Microservices Help Us to Achieve?

Microservices helps us to solve many problems that come with maintaining a huge monolith. When individual teams focus on a single problem to be solved, it becomes easier for them to build into their own service. It helps them focus on important features or bugs and develop them quickly. This leads to a quicker deployment as well since the deployment belongs to the smaller team and they release as quickly as possible. When multiple teams work simultaneously on different services, the development gets parallelized without entanglements. Also, if there is a need, a single service which has huge volume of requests, it can be scaled to solve the problem instead of the scaling the entire service as a whole. There is another intangible benefit that help us in building distributed systems - a contract based development where the other teams need not worry about what goes inside the system and can blindly believe on the contract specified by the team for their APIs. In a nutshell we can list them down as:
  • Focussed Development
  • Faster releases
  • Parallelized development
  • Scalability
  • Black box APIs
  • Technology Diversity
While building microservices, if care is not taken it could lead to a few problems of its own as listed down below.
  • Too much fragmentation could arise
  • Increased complexity of maintaining and integrating different services
  • Distributed monolith

Areas of Deep Dive Needed

There are some potential areas like Authentication & Authorization where the services can know who was calling and to check whether the request was authorized that needs to be baked into each service. Also backward compatibility might become an area where each service has to be compatible in their APIs with microservices that are still using the old endpoints. Service Discovery is also another topic which needs to be discussed in detail where how services establish themselves for others to be discovered. API Gateway is one another topic that can talk about how each call goes through to the services from the public consumers.

Since I have talked about the fundamentals of microservices architecture, I will be diving deep into these topics and how I have solved some of these problems at my work in another post.

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This is an personal opinion essay from Jey Geethan about chatbots and its future.

Pre-Introduction

Chatbots are programmatically independent software engines which mimic the way that consumers talk to a person and answer them in a appropriate ways - This could be the simplest way in which you can describe them. Also, you can imagine them to be a situation where instead of you talking to a real person over chat, social media, phone or email, you are instead talking to a computer agent who replies on the human's behalf.

Introduction

Chatbots are almost everywhere now. Every banking website that you see, you have a bot icon at their bottom right corner. Website owners are also implementing chatbots for their websites where they feel that the chatbots can help their visitors in terms of information and also to reduce the amount of work done by the human counterparts.

In this essay/article, I would discuss about what the future of conversations are. What might happen to chatbots and what could become of the chatbots as we see now.

Computers are becoming more conversational as future unfolds.

Reduction of Human Work

Chatbots reduce the amount of work that needs to be done from a company perspective. If you see the following example, one can find that the work of understanding and taking action on it is being already done by the chatbot.

It just feels easier to use conversation to get things done. Image Credit: Loyalty Apps

The advantage the consumer gets is that he/she feels the same way about talking to another person and also getting the work done. It doesn't feel out of place and the consumer is still in his/her comfort zone which by business parlance is just as good as it can get for retaining the customer trust. The reduction of work by humans can come in many ways:

  1. Information retrieval - pulling out information related to customer questions
    • Example: Frequently answered questions on consumer queries
  2. Information submission - note down relevant information from the consumer
    • Example: Table booking at a restaurant
  3. Information transformation - Present consumer's data in a readable format


Chatbots can actually go up a higher on the pyramid and try to build meaningful conversations that can help the consumers to trust and and build a rapport with the business brand.

Are All Conversations Good Conversations?

The smothering truth of the conversations with the chatbots is that you will feel repeated and you will end up wanting to talk to a real person who can help you better. See the below example.

Chat conversation gone wrong. Image Credit: Chatbots Magazine

Conversations that can definitely improve on the current consumer situation - be it a helping hand, providing the right information at the right time or helping the customer to commit to the right journey for him/her - would be the utmost purpose of a conversation chatbot. If it fails to accomplish the same for the various reasons, we will be getting the consumer distrust and irritation.

Can Chatbots Rule the World?

I personally think that the chatbots if done well, can in-fact rule the entire world. For example, take the google's example of Google Assistant calling the restaurant to book a table for you. This is a real good example of how a computerised system can do better and complex jobs for you and even take decisions for you. If the complexity that goes into building a chatbot and decisions that come out of each interaction with the chatbots increase with time, the future is near for the chatbots to take care of our almost entire day-to-day work.

Combine this thought process with the availability of big data and you have a customer profile which can be a very useful additive to base decisions on. When big data can enable marketing, big data can definitely help chatbots become more useful in the future.

The Future is Conscious Bots

The bots that behave in alignment with the users' consciousness will outweigh bots that are just conversational in nature. When you can empathize and sympathize with your consumers intelligently and understand where the consumer is feeling the pain, that's where the chatbots will excel very much. Conscious bots are an extended arm to what chatbots are currently with more decisions that can be taken by the bot on behalf of the consumer. The conscious bots can possibly do these in the future:

  • Get to understand consumer behavior
    • This can be done by understanding the customer behavior on website, and elsewhere
  • Support more and vast variety of customer decisions with actionable items
    • Enable consumers to do anything that they want and not limited to a set of pre-built actions
  • Suggest options based on the consumer mood and emotion
    • Understand the consumer in his/her journey and suggest options accordingly to his positive or negative experience with the brand.
  • Take proactive actions based on consumer behavior
    • Enable consumers to repeat or automate certain actions based on his/her previous actions and the bots can extract this insight from the big-data blackbox of consumer behaviors and his/her similarly profiled consumers.
Conscious bots will sprout when the current chatbots can enable the people to do more things correctly and when it hits a ceiling of possibilities with the current chatbot model.

Conclusion

Chatbots are on its way to success in helping consumers in getting their actions done. But it also means that it will pave its way for something more meaningful to rise up and be the heart of the Tin-Man of Oz.


Share your comments and views below.

You can follow me at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Website.
There are umpteen number of articles about marketing and how to do it better. I am going to take a shot at quickly defining what marketing can do to your business and how it will help you increase your sales and thereby revenue.

What are Jey Geethan's Quick Articles?

These are short articles which are easier for the readers to read/consume. These articles will give you a short burst of information in a smaller timeframe. This is not a way to move away from long content, those are available in this website and you can subscribe to my email newsletter to receive more.



What is marketing? - Jey Geethan
What is marketing? - Jey Geethan

At first lets talk about what marketing goals are. These goals can be attained by numerous activities which I am going to let you figure out. Marketing can be described as an activity with these goals:

  1. Make sure the product is aligned with the market
  2. Research the target audience
  3. Reach the target audience for a product/service
  4. Strategic messaging to create awareness
  5. Increase product demand

PRODUCT MARKET ALIGNMENT:

Goal: Make sure that the product that you are building is catering to market. Don't build something that doesn't have a market. This is done by market research surveys etc.

TARGET RESEARCH:

Goal: To make sure that the target audiences/consumers/customers are defined and their personas are ready with you. You need to know whom your end customers are going to be and define their income range, region, persona is. This can be done by field research and competitor research etc.

TARGET REACH:

Goal: To reach your target in the most specific and targeted way with your marketing materials. Read here about content marketing.

STRATEGIC MESSAGING:

Goal: To go beyond your usual target reach and make sure you tweak your messaging to cater to recent trends. This is done by hosting conferences etc. New trends in marketing could help you make such decisions easily.

INCREASE PRODUCT DEMAND:

Goal: By following the above said goals, you increase the current demand for your product thereby increasing the sales and conversion. 

This is a very short introduction to marketing. Hope it was worth reading a few seconds of your time. 

Share your views on the comments below.

You can follow me at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Website.
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