My first Love: The Moon

Oh moon
The friend of mine
In my dark mood you shine
In my lone place you are present
To accompany me in my yearning
Your presence I feel the comfort
A good buddy of mine
Thanks a lot pal
Oh moon


Since the day when I got my sense and came to know about the Moon, I fell in love with it. What is this…? A mystical substance hanging somewhere near to me, feeling to touch it, but cannot as my father says that it is situated so far from me, the distance of which i can never imagine…! A white light which comes only during night and i have to wait for it till evening, to tell about the scold that i used to get from my mother during daytime. In the evening, i used to complain against my mother in front of my father and the Moon, when I could see both. It was something, which I could not designate as my parents or sister, but a family member, as I love it very much. This was my first love! So, day by day, that attachment started growing.

When i grew up and during my early days of the school, one day my mother said that i belonged to Cancer moonsign...! What did it mean…? She explained me that in my birth horoscope, the moon is present in Cancer sign, so I belonged to cancer moonsign. Okay, fine, but why is the moonsign named after the placement of the Moon not the Sun or the Jupiter or any other planet…! And why there is no other concept named as Jupiter Sign or Saturn sign in astrology, about which i should know like the way she told me about moonsign which plays a vital role in a person’s life. It was a question in my mind, though i didnot get its answer, at that moment, i had to be happy by getting the reason why i love the Moon so much, because i belonged to Cancer moonsign.

There was always a curious mind playing in my mind to find out the justification of presence of these astronomical objects and their effect in our life, proving it scientifically.

As i grew up in my life, started taking interest in Astrology. At that time, there was no internet, books were the only one source of knowledge and i used to get a very little knowledge from the books read by my mother, which were used by my paternal grandfather, who had a keen interest in Astrology. And whenever i was getting a horoscope, i used to spend hours together to analyse it. As i grew and involved in a professional education and then had to start my professional career, i kept myself away from it, as this was taking myself to a very depth of finding out the true relationship between these astronomical solar system and the human body, for which i had to spend a lot of time and once i get involved into this, it was becoming very difficult for me to come back the the normal mechanical life.

Life continued like this…Many years passed by this time.

Few years back, again I started taking interest in astrology to analyse my birth horoscope to find out what is the true significance of my birth, what is the destiny of my life, how was my life affected by karma done in this life and done in previous life, how could i rectify the bad karma and how could i start moving towards the Paramatma. All this started when i came out from a traumatic event happened in my life. Whereas my father believes only in the karma of this life. He doesn’t believe the karma of past life which we generally say Luck or Bhagya. So, all of my these activities had brought a kind of dissatisfaction towards me and for which he was scared that one day, i should not say that i would like to be a Sanyashini, which he didnt like. So, for all these reason, i had to be very careful while doing all these studies. And one day, i came to know about the true destiny of my life, leading a mechanical life with profession and personal life. By this time, i had explored that the effect of Ascendant of a person on its life. Ascendant is the place of first house in a person’s horoscope. And I am a Leo ascendant person, and the Sun is the lord of Leo sign. Even though i dont love the Sun at all, as it hurts me a lot, but i had to accept it, as i got another friend to talk in the daytime.

One day, when i was talking with one of my friend, he told me “Suchi, control your mind”. Generally, I am a very free, naughty, open-hearted and blunt kind of person and I say whatever comes to my mind whether positive or negative about the opposite person and i dont care at all how he takes it. I am far away from the fake person. Simultaneously, i always keep my self very open to accept any valid negative feedback towards me too. By doing this, i feel that i can detach myself immediately from the negative thought coming to my mind about the once i say in front of the person. So, i have very few friends circle. I love my friendship the most.  He said me so because my this kind of speech may be considered as very rude for the opposite person. He was right and he wanted me not to say the right words in front of the opposite person, which may hurt him and as a result i may lose his friendship with me. But, i can never be a fake person. After coming back to my house, i started analyzing about the reason of the destruction of a person and how that can be controlled.

What i found is that mind is the only reason of all kind of destruction of a person. Each and every destruction comes out from the emotion, whether it is positive or negative, if its positive, but in a destructive way, then again it becomes negative. For example, being in Love is an emotion, but too much of emotional is not good and being in emotional and spending so much of money is also a reason of destruction for us. So, once we control our mind, we can control the negative consequences happen in our life. And this is a practice, not a job of one day. I dont know whether that friend of mine would be reading this or not, but here, i would like to thank him, because of whom i  realized that controlling mind is good. I had a crush towards a person and told in front of him, and after few days i came out from that feelings. So, i always feel that telling my feelings in front of a person is a great way to detach myself from that feeling. But, before that why cannot i control my mind to not roam in that feelings. And that is best way of getting attached towards my Paramatma. And now i came to know what is the significance of moonsign, why moonsign is so important and why there is no concept as Jupitersign or Saturnsign :).

Every thing around us has an effect on something within us – be it our exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation (UVR), looking at the morning sky, taking a walk in the forest, or swimming in the sea – nature’s beauty prompts the flow of hormones and energy in our body. But not everything that’s present in nature is fundamentally good for human beings. As part of my analysis of my horoscope, i had found out that I belong to 4th Pada of Cancer moonsign. Cancer is ruled by the Moon. When the Moon sits in its own sign, it becomes very strong in its own behavior. Means i am a very emotional person, as the moon only reflects the light of the sun, its energy affects the water, and the mind of human body. And this is scientifically proven, which is why when someone goes crazy, they are called lunatics. The word lunatic is derived from the word ‘lunar’ because the mind is connected to the moon. Ancient people did an in-depth study about  how the moon affects the mind, how the moon is moving around in different constellations; how different degrees of the moon has a definite impact on the mind. That’s what they use the words ‘Tara-bal’ and‘Chandra-bal’. The moon is in one constellation for two and a half days, then it moves to the other constellation. So in two and half days there are changes in the mood of the mind. The moon has an effect on water and our body contains a lot of water. Hence on the day of Purnima or Full Moon it is beneficial to do meditation, as a strong vibration happens in our body and meditation is much required to control our mind during that time. This is most applicable for the people born on Cancer moonsign and cancer ascendant. And it is suggested to these people be in a deep meditation during this time, to calm down the effect of these strong vibrations.

Let us see how the moon effects our body: Indian ancient scriptures such as Vishnu Purana talk about the origin of the moon. According to this Purana, the moon has emerged from the Milky ocean with his soft and snowy beams. Food that we consume is converted into 2 parts – Mind energy and Prana. The mind energy is centered in the pineal gland area from which vital hormones get secreted. The moon enters this gland to take control of all our activities from night till the time we wake up. The rays of the moon affect human beings, animals, plants, water and so on. Our body consists of 60% water. So, the full moon meditation helps the seekers in going inward, transcend the mind, and feel the divinity within.

Medical professionals often report that more injuries occur during a full moon, and law enforcement officers note that people often point to the full moon as an explanation of their “bad behavior.” In 2005, researchers from the Mayo Clinic found no increase in the number of visits to a psychiatric emergency department they studied during the three nights when the moon was full as compared to other nights. However, Elizabeth Loftus, a professor who teaches cognitive science at UCI, did concede that perhaps the full moon makes people who are already mentally unstable feel a bit more uneasy than usual, which might cause them to act out in unusual ways.








Day 5: Evolution of Product Management

Why the Product Management is so important today? If we try to get the definitive history of the vague, challenging but fast-moving role of product manager having so much crossover with other roles such as Marketing and User Experience, it’s useful to consider the roots of the role and how it has evolved, which will help us to understand the organizational shift that has happened drastically since last few decades, with a change in concept, capabilities, thinking around product management and some of the underlying conflicts that still exist today.

Birth of Product Management

Modern product management was conceived in 1931 with a memo written by Neil H. McElroy at Procter & Gamble. The memo was a justification for hiring a “Brand Person”, who can take the responsibility for a brand from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising, and promotions the deficient of which in the team was a the pain point for all leaders but became a cornerstone in modern thinking about brand management and ultimately product management. So this led to the birth of Product Management and made P & G into a brand-centric organization and to the birth of the product manager in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) field.

Hewlett and Packard implemented the concept of  “Brand Person” as the decision making person by closely working with the customer and termed it as “Voice of Customer” providing the organisation 20% year-on-year growth between 1943 and 1993.

Post World War II, the shortage of cash-flow forced industries in Japan, to develop Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing. Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda, evolved the concept of “Brand Person” and developed the Toyota Production System and the Toyota Way after continuous improvement, which includes not just on eliminating waste in the production process but also on two important principles any modern product manager should apply: kaizen, improving the business continuously while always driving for innovation and evolution, and genchi genbutsu, going to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions.

Then, in West, Hewlett-Packard was one of the first to recognize its value and embrace it, bringing this customer-centric, brand-vertical, and lean manufacturing way of thinking with them to their future jobs, quickly permeating the growing Silicon Valley with the same ethos.

From here, the concept of  product management spread into every hardware and software company to become the global and evolving role.

Technical Product Management

The original product managers, in FMCG today, were very much a part of the marketing function, who focus on the Market Mix with 4 P’s: the right product, in the right place, at the right price, using the right promotion.

As the product management role moved into the tech world, this separation from the development and production of the product created a gap in understanding the complete product and which made the alignment of product development along with understanding the customer and their needs. This split between marketing and product management is still felt in many tech organizations today, where both departments feel they own the customer and understand the marketplace. However, in most tech organizations, marketing has evolved to be more about owning the brand and customer acquisition, while product owns the value proposition and development.

Agile Product Management

Initially, in Waterfall model, the Product Manager had to write a long Product Requirement Document (PRD), which was taking several months for him to complete, after that it was given to Engg team to develop and when the implemented product was coming out from the desk of engg team, it was something different, which was leading the start the process all over again.

In 2001, 17 software engineers got together in a ski resort and wrote the Agile Manifesto, which articulated the principles behind all the various methodologies (Scrum, Kanban etc…) and is still incredibly influential and valuable today.

Agile Manifesto provided a clear definition of software development by defining the below:


The Agile Manifesto added a great value in product development by giving an information about what to be developed with the business need to the software developers and making free the product managers from preparing a long specification document, allowing him to focus on customer collaboration.

The above approach changed the technical product management into many folds.

Firstly, it changed the relationship between product management and engineering from adversarial to collaborative. Scrum invented the role of product owner, but Agile methods all embraced frequent and in-person communication between product management and engineering as the foremost way to find and build the best solution to a customer problem.

Secondly, focusing on the customer eased the gap between the research, specification, and development phases of a project and introduced the vital role of User Experience (UX), in the ongoing process of discovery and development. It’s clear that our industry’s transition to a fully integrated customer-focused process is not complete.


Day 4: Types of Product Managers

The job of a product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible. So, a good product manager must be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and conversant with practitioners of all three.

PMBusiness: Product management is above all else a business function, focused on maximizing business value from a product. Product managers should be primarily focused on optimizing a product to achieve business goals while maximizing return on investment.

User experience (UX): Most importantly, the product manager is the voice of the customer inside the business because of customer the product exists. So, the product manager must be passionate about customers and the specific problems they’re trying to solve. Even though, many organisation have a different role as UX Manager, who involves in UX based on the customer’s requirement, but its the responsibility of  the product manager to talk to customers, testing the product, and getting feedback firsthand, as well as working closely with internal and external UX designers and researchers, are all part of this process.
Technology: There’s no point in defining what to build if you don’t know how it will get built. This doesn’t mean a product manager needs to be able to code, but understanding the technology stack—and most importantly, the level of effort involved—is crucial to making the right decisions. This is key in an Agile world where product managers spend more time with the development team than with anyone else inside the business, and need a shared language and understanding with their engineers.

Other functions, like team development, marketing, and strategic planning, play a part too, but business, UX, and technology form the core of what product managers do every day.


Chapter 3: Product Lifecycle Management

In our previous discussion, we discussed a high level definition of Product Management, where a PM has to get involve in the Product Life Cycle. So, what is Product Life Cycle?

Products have a limited life whether it is a mobile phone or Software product used in an investment bank and thus every product has a life cycle. Product sales pass through distinct stages, each posing different challenges, opportunities, and problems to the seller.Products require different marketing, financing, manufacturing, purchasing, and human resource strategies in each life cycle stage.

A life cycle of product consists of four phases:

Introduction: This is the stage in which the product has been introduced first time in the market and the sales of the product starts to grow slowly and gradually and the profit received from the product is nominal and non-attained. The market for the product is not competitive initially and also the company spends initially on the advertisement and uses various other tools for promotion in order to motivate and produce awareness among the consumers, therefore generating discerning demands for particular brand. The products start to gain distribution as the product is initially new in the market and in this stage the quality of the product is not assured and the price of the product will also be determined as low or high.

Growth: In the growth stage, the product is present already in the market and the consumers of the products are habitual of the product and also there is quick growth in the product sales as more new and new customers are using and trying and are becoming aware of the product. The customers are becoming satisfied from the product and they bought it again and again. The ratio of the product repetition for the trial procurement risen and also at this level, the competitors have started to overflow the market with more appealing and attractive inventions. This helps in creating increased competition in the market and also results in decreasing the product price.

Maturity: In maturity stage, the cost of the product has been decreased because of the increased volume of the product and the product started to experience the curve effects. Also, more and more competitors have seen to be leaving the market. In this way very few buyers have been left for the product and this results in less sales of the product. The decline of the product and cost of attaining new buyers in this level is more as compare to the resulted profit. The brand or the product differentiation via rebating and discounts in price supports in recalling the outlet distribution. Also, there is a decline in the entire cost of marketing through enhancing the distribution and promotional efficiency with switching brand and segmentation.

Decline: In this stage, the profit as well as the sales of the product has started to decline because of the deletion of the product from the market. The market for the product in this stage, started to show negative rate of growth and corroding cash flows. The product at this stage may be kept but there should be fewer adverts.


So, now our duty to identify the phase in which our product is and based on that the strategy for the product should be formulated. There are many softwares in the market to manage the Product life cycle such as  ArenaPLM, SAP PLM and Aras PLM etc…

Chapter 2: What is Product Management

What is Product Management: As discussed in our previous article, Product Management is an organisational lifecycle function within a company dealing with its general business structure supports and manages all the activities related to developing, marketing and selling a product – or even more than one – all through its lifecycle. Managing a product encompasses everything related to a specific product, from creating a concept and studying the targeted audience to developing, producing and marketing it and providing customer support afterwards. Product management’s general business purposes are to make the product valuable for its targeted customer (creating customer value) while producing measurable benefits that make every business viable such as revenue, profit margins, etc.

Chapter 1: Product Management- A Samarinda Fruit

I had never heard about the term Product Management since 2012, before getting interview call from my current Organisation. My first round of interview was taken by the Sr. Product Manager and I was quite impressed by his roles, responsibilities and personality. Keeping that as my future goal, I decided to join with the Organisation. This was my first Product Organisation, where I had to get involved in the Product Development R&D team, as a Business Analyst, where Product Management was a hugely used term. Due to a smaller number of years of experience, I was designated as Senior Business Analyst, to adhere to the Organisation’s policy. But I had to own the responsibilities of complete offshore work and I need to closely work with my Subject Matter Expert (SME) to get all kind of requirements, who was residing in the Head Quarter of the Organisation.

Lets go to the story, how I explored the concept of Product Management, got acquainted with it, performed, where I faced the challenges and how I was able to overcome it. The complete story will be published in a series of blogs. So, stay tuned with me…

On the first day, I joined in the Organisation, the Director, Delivery of my Product, called me and said me to triage some customer reported defects. I was completely unaware about the Product and was quite new to the Life Science domain, even though before I had worked in Payer and Provider model of Health Care domain. In the middle of the day, my manager told me to review the Release note of the release which was about to go on the same day and I had to send the Acceptance into Production email. I was unaware about the scope of the release; then how could I review the release note…!!! And at last at the end of the day, my SME asked me to analyse the FDA AERS data, so that we could add that as another data source for our product. I did never have heard about Post Marketing Adverse Event reporting system before, did not have any idea about the minimum attributes required to validate an adverse event case…! Then how could I able to analyse FDA AERS data.

At the end of the day, I learn that Product Management is like an Avocado, which looks very attractive and prestigious from outside but when you go inside it, you found it very difficult. Product management is an important organizational role. Product managers are typically found at companies that are building products or technology for customer or internal use. And a Product Manager should be enough patient to meet the reasonable expectation of all the customers in a validated manner. Product management’s general business purposes are to make the product valuable for its targeted customer (creating customer value) while producing measurable benefits that make every business viable such as revenue, profit margins, etc. Since its goal is to deliver value to the business, product management professionals play an essentially strategic role in determining the necessary actions for achieving these goals.

In short, Product management is a multi-faceted, complex discipline that can be difficult to grasp and hard to master.

Topic 3: Machine Learning: Practical examples

Topic 3: Practical examples

Application of machine learning vast in our daily life, starting from robotic voice answering in customer support calls, voice to text conversion in whatsapp messaging, text recommendation in Google search, chatbots in any customer support chat and many more.

Below are some more practical examples:

  • Face Detection: It is a is a computer technology being used in a variety of applications that identifies human faces in digital images, which uses Face-detection algorithms focus on the detection of frontal human faces. It is analogous to image detection in which the image of a person is matched bit by bit with the image stores in database. Any facial feature changes in the database will invalidate the matching process.
  • Bioinformatics: Gene Prediction in Genomicsis a problem which has an increasing need for the development of machine learning systems that can automatically determine the location of protein-encoding genes within a given DNA sequence. Machine learning has also been used for the problem of multiple sequence alignment which involves aligning many DNA or amino acid sequences in order to determine regions of similarity that could indicate a shared evolutionary history. It can also be used to detect and visualize genome rearrangements
  • Fraud Detection:  Fraudis a billion-dollar business and it is increasing every year. Through statistical techniques and artificial intelligence, a fraud can be detected whether it happens in ecommerce or banking transactions.
  • Space exploration: Space exploration is the discoveryand exploration of celestial structures in outer space by means of evolving and growing space technology. While the study of space is carried out mainly by astronomers with telescopes, the physical exploration of space is conducted both by unmanned robotic space probes, radio astronomy and human spaceflight.
  • Robotics: A self driving car combines a variety of techniques to perceive their surroundings, including radarlaser lightGPSodometry, and computer vision. Its advanced control systemsinterpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage.
  • Information extraction: Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructuredand/or semi-structured machine-readable In most of the cases this activity concerns processing human language texts by means of natural language processing (NLP). Recent activities in multimedia document processing like automatic annotation and content extraction out of images/audio/video could be seen as information extraction.
  • Document Classification: Document classification or document categorization is a problem in library scienceinformation scienceand computer science. The task is to assign a document to one or more classes or categories. The algorithmic based classification of documents is mainly in information science and computer science. The documents to be classified may be texts, images, music, etc. Each kind of document possesses its special classification problems. Documents may be classified according to their subjects or according to other attributes (such as document type, author, printing year etc.).
  • Classification of images: A topic of pattern recognitionin computer vision, is an approach of classification based on contextual information in images. “Contextual” means this approach is focusing on the relationship of the nearby pixels, which is also called neighbourhood. The goal of this approach is to classify the images by using the contextual information. if only a small portion of the image is shown, it is very difficult to tell what the image is about. However, if we increase the contextual of the image, then it makes more sense to recognize.

The only thing matters is that what is your domain of interest and how could you use machine learning in that domain?

Topic 2: History of Machine Learning

Topic 2: History of Machine Learning

Even though, the name machine learning was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, but its history is quite old.

It was in 1940s when the first manually operated computer system, ENIAC, was invented. At that time the word “computer” was being used as a name for a human with intensive numerical computation capabilities, so, ENIAC was called a numerical computing machine! Well, you may say it has nothing to do with learning?! WRONG, from the beginning the idea was to build a machine able to emulate human thinking and learning. In, 1952 — Arthur Samuel wrote the first computer learning program. The program was the game of checkers, and the IBM computer improved at the game the more it played, studying which moves made up winning strategies and incorporating those moves into its program.

This program helped checkers players a lot in improving their skills! Around the same time, 1957 — Frank Rosenblatt designed the first neural network for computers (the perceptron), which simulate the thought processes of the human brain, which was a very, very simple classifier but when it was combined in large numbers, in a network, it became a powerful monster. Well, monster is relative to the time and in that time, it was a real breakthrough.

Then, the discoveries in neural network didn’t stop.


1979 — Students at Stanford University invent the “Stanford Cart” which can navigate obstacles in a room on its own.




1997 — IBM’s Deep Blue beats the world champion at chess.

Thanks to statistics, because of what, machine learning became very famous in 1990s. The intersection of computer science and statistics gave birth to probabilistic approaches in AI. This shifted the field further toward data-driven approaches. Having large-scale data available, scientists started to build intelligent systems that were able to analyze and learn from large amounts of data. As a highlight, IBM’s Deep Blue system beat the world champion of chess, the grand master Garry Kasparov.

It continued with more fast pace.





2015 – Amazon launches its own machine learning platform.




We can consider the 90s as one of the golden eras of machine learning. During the decade there were significant contributions to the field. In addition to the developments being made on the algorithm side, the hardware and the technology were also improving dramatically! For years, you saw computers becoming not only more powerful but smaller in size! This huge advancement also contributed a lot to scientific progress in general, and to AI in particular.

Dear Buddies, do not get worry with so many scientific words mentioned here. We will learn everything step by step.

Machine Learning

Topic1: What is Machine Learning?

Think of a day when the sky is full of dark clouds and thunderstorms. The first thing that comes to our mind is its going to rain today.

How do you know that it’s going to rain?

Because, in our life, whenever we have seen the sky behaving the same then it has rained. That’s what Machine Learning is.

Machine learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence that provides systems the ability to automatically learn by using statistical techniques and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed.

For a given problem, Machine learning (ML) models learn from past recorded problems and solutions, use an algorithm to learn, understands the solution, then use this learning experience to give solutions in future.

Talking technically, there is a huge database containing data of a particular domain of several years from past history. The process of learning begins with observations or data, in order to look for patterns in data and make better decisions in the future based on the examples that we provide. A particular algorithm is made to run on this data that does data analysis, to recognize the hidden pattern in the data. When further such a same situation arises then the computer gives the solution that fall in the specific range of the pattern recognized. The primary aim is to allow the computers learn automatically without human intervention or assistance and adjust actions accordingly.

diaWriting software is the bottleneck, we don’t have enough good developers. Let the data do the work instead of people. Machine learning is the way to make programming scalable. Machine Learning is getting computers to program themselves.

Traditional Programming: Data and program is run on the computer to produce the output.


Machine Learning: Data and output is run on the computer to create a program.


Machine learning is like farming or gardening. Seeds is the algorithms, nutrients is the data, the gardener is you and plants is the programs.

Any technology user today has encountered machine learning in his day to day life. Facial recognition technology allows social media platforms to help users tag and share photos of friends. Recommendation engines, powered by machine learning, suggest what movies or television shows to watch next based on user preferences. A self-driving car is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without much human input.

Competitive Strategy for Market Leadership

Competitive Strategy talks about what unique value do you bring to the marketplace and your customers. To succeed in the marketplace, companies must embrace a competitive strategy one or more among three generic competitive strategies, or value disciplines: operational excellencecustomer intimacy and product leadership. 

Operational excellence:

Companies that focus on operational excellence don’t innovate products or service. However, they do operate a hassle-free service with low prices. Amazon, Walmart and McDonalds are examples of companies where operational excellence is their strategic priority. All systems are designed around the ability to be highly efficient including their ordering and fulfillment systems. An operational excellence strategy aims to accomplish cost leadership. Here the main focus centres on automating manufacturing processes and work procedures in order to streamline operations and reduce cost. The strategy lends itself to high-volume, transaction-oriented and standardized production that has little need for much differentiation. A strategy of operational excellence is ideal for markets where customers value cost over choice, which is often the case for mature, commoditized markets where cost leadership provides a vehicle for continued growth. Leaders in the area of operational excellence are strongly centralized, with strong organizational discipline and a standardized, rule-based operation. Measuring the performance of key processes and benchmarking costs comprise an integral part of the operations of these companies who relentlessly seek to streamline their processes in order to eradicate errors.

Customer intimacy:

A marketing strategy where a service supplier or product retailer gets close to their clients. The benefits of greater customer intimacy for a business might include improved highly tailored problem solving capabilities and greater adaptation of products to customer needs, as well as higher customer loyalty levels.

The customer intimacy strategy focuses on offering a unique range of customer services that allows for the personalization of service and the customization of products to meet differing customer needs. Often companies who pursue this strategy bundle services and products into a “solution” designed specifically for the individual customer.

The successful design of solutions requires vendors to possess deep customer knowledge as well as insights into their customers’ business processes. The solutions offered rarely present the cheapest option for the customer, nor the most innovative, but are regarded as “good enough.”

Customer-centric companies tend to have a decentralized organization which allows them to learn and change quickly according to customers’ needs. These types of companies often keep an entire ecosystem of partners for the actual production and delivery of products and services to their customers. Examples of companies who pursue this type of strategy include IBM, Lexus, Virgin Atlantic and

Product leadership:

Product leadership as a competitive strategy aims to build a culture that continuously brings superior products to market. Here product leaders achieve premium market prices thanks to the experience they create for their customers.

The corporate disciplines they cultivate include:

  • Research portfolio management
  • Teamwork
  • Product management
  • Marketing
  • Talent management

Product leaders recognize that excellence in creativity, problem solving and teamwork is critical to their success. This reliance on expensive talent means that product leaders seek to leverage their expertise across geographical and organizational boundaries by mastering such disciplines as collaboration and knowledge management.

The consumer electronics, fund management, automotive and pharmaceutical industries include many companies pursuing a strategy of product leadership. Examples of these include Apple, BMW and Pfizer.