Posts by: Anirban Sengupta

unsplash default post photo-350px

Why Business Communication Is All About Great Story-Telling

By Anirban Sengupta August 3, 2016

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.”

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Designing a Product Roadmap-II

By Anirban Sengupta March 4, 2016

It is not expected that all the dates mentioned in the product roadmaps are hard deadlines. An audience is cognizant of the fact that sometimes product launches can get delayed due to unforeseen reasons. Yet consistently not sticking to the roadmap may lead the audience to question a firm’s credibility. A great idea would be to backdate the roadmap, to some extent, to demonstrate the compliance so far and then to open up the future.

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Designing a Product Roadmap – I

By Anirban Sengupta February 4, 2016

Not all products however enjoy the ‘soap & detergent’ kind of stability. Phones in 1990s were used for calling and today calling is one of the many functions of a phone. Cars back then were mechanical marvels and now they’re practically computers on wheels. In case of software and applications, the product life-cycle graph is even thinner and very well summed up in a comment by Reid Hoffman (Linkedin Cofounder): “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Pricing Automation: Questions to Ask

By Anirban Sengupta January 3, 2016

Getting back to the shop-floor example: what if you realized that you ended up buying a few million dollar worth machinery but had to retain the workforce to run the machines as per requirements? In fact you ended up renting a bigger floor to accommodate the humans and machines?

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Semiconductor Socket Wars – III

By Anirban Sengupta November 5, 2015

The war for the new world is not just different because of the absence of a defender – it could be even more complex since the sockets itself may not be pre-defined.

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Semiconductor Socket Wars – II

By Anirban Sengupta October 6, 2015

If a customer doesn’t need to make design changes to change the chip in a socket they are likely to continuously engage with multiple competing suppliers – not just to get the best price but also to secure supply. In fact in some cases customers are reluctant to design in proprietary chips, as they believe that having a single supplier for a product is very risky!

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Semiconductor Socket Wars – I

By Anirban Sengupta September 11, 2015

For a company, a socket means a business. When they talk about winning a “socket” they mean winning a new business. For example let’s say a product uses a microcontroller – all microcontroller companies would be fighting to win the microcontroller socket inside that product and all other such products that use a microcontroller.

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Cost-Plus or Value-Based (Services)

By Anirban Sengupta June 10, 2015

Value-based pricing talks about pricing based on whether a product provides more or less perceived value with respect to the next best alternative. In the case of professional services however there is a slight difference — since there is the “human touch” involved we can’t be sure whether the next best alternative is a true alternative at all.

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Cost-Plus or Value-Based: Who Wins?

By Anirban Sengupta May 11, 2015

Cost-plus pricers believe in understanding the cost of making a product and then adding a profit margin on top of the cost to arrive at the price of the product. Value-based pricers on the other hand are not keen at looking at cost or a target mark-up. Instead they focus on realizing the value that the product brings to the customer and then pricing it according to the value.

More
unsplash default post photo-350px

Managing Value: Getting Smarter

By Anirban Sengupta March 15, 2015

When every opportunity is studied using Economic Value Models and priced totally based on the value delivered (and agreed upon with customer), we are heading towards a situation of easier wins leading to eventual revenue growth and market share increase.

More

About The Author

Anirban Sengupta headshot
Anirban is a core-team member at Lifkart (an Early stage Indian Construction Start-up). Prior to the current gig he worked for about 5 years as a pricing manager at Cypress Semiconductor. He holds a BE in Electrical Engineering from National Institute of Technology , India and an MBA in Marketing from Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development (SCMHRD), Pune, India.