DEV Community: Abhishek

Last mile deliveries: Getting it right

Abhishek — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 12:53:02 +0000

People get accustomed to the conveniences of buying things from home: Three out of four Americans want their online orders to be brought right to their doorsteps. This places additional pressure on logistics and especially on its final stage — last-mile delivery. Here are some of the important considerations to get it right:

A route optimization algorithm identifies the fastest and most cost-effective, multi-stop routes for drivers, considering numerous factors — such as traffic, travel distances, and time windows offered to customers. Advanced solutions may accommodate predefined routes to real-time changes.

An auto-dispatch engine matches a delivery task with a specific driver based on pre-defined priorities and business rules. This significantly saves labor cost and service time.

Real-time driver (fleet) tracking leverages GPS technology and drivers’ smartphones to ensure fleet visibility. They let dispatchers and customers know where vehicles are without the need for any additional hardware.

An estimated time of arrival (ETA) calculation predicts when a driver or courier will place the parcel on a customer’s doorstep. Predictive analytics and machine learning technologies increase the accuracy of such estimations, taking into account different factors — like GPS coordinates, distance to the next stop, the average length of breaks, and historical data.

Status updates are sent to customers on a regular basis to keep them informed about their orders. Some solutions may come with live chats or the ability to make a direct call to a dispatcher or driver.

An electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) allows customers to sign their names electronically right on drivers’ tablets or smartphones. E-signatures are uploaded into the system’s backend to confirm deliveries.

A data dashboard displays all key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to monitor operations and optimize services.
With all basic modules in place, there is still no universal solution fitting any existing last mile scenario. Functionality for prepared meal deliveries will somewhat differ from alcohol deliveries coming with confirmation requirements, or white glove shipping that deals with expensive, fragile, and climate-sensitive purchases.

Did I miss anything? Feel free to add it in the comments!

PM's Guide on Understanding the Customers

Abhishek — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 05:10:57 +0000

Who are your customers, and what do they want? If answering that question is not the first part of the puzzle that you are going to solve, all your efforts to ensure strategic alignment are futile. You'll align your product team's efforts to a skewed product strategy that itself doesn't reflect your customers' expectations.

Getting the customer needs right is the nucleus of your product's success. It fuels user-centric innovation and refines your efforts to achieve business objectives. It establishes a central goal of meeting customers' expectations, which simplifies and streamlines decision-making. If you're looking to become a product manager, you would be aware how crucial it is to understand your users.

But how do you get it right? Isn't the Jobs-to-be-done framework (JTBD) enough? How many customer interviews do you conduct? Is buyer personas assessment necessary if you have conducted JTBD interviews? Is there a comprehensive checklist and objective enough to help you understand every aspect of customers' needs? It turns out there is! We have put together a list of tips for you to answer all of these questions.

Define a Customer Value Proposition (CVPs) with JTBD Framework
The jobs-to-be-done framework has been a hit in the product management community across the globe to outline the actual customer expectations. Unlike other techniques like interviews, focus groups, feedbacks, JTBD doesn't focus on past mistakes, building on strengths, and reinforcing the iteration process. It determines the customers' actual goals and removes bias and assumptions from the equation.

The JTBD framework poses simple questions- What are the jobs that the product has been hired for? What are the customers' goals behind hiring the product? What are the pain-points for the customers without the product? Put down your Customer Value Proposition using the JTBD framework, which will act as the product's central goal.

Determine the Ideal Customer Journey

The customer's journey consists of multiple stages, from the point where the customer finds, assesses, purchases, or signs up, right to the point where they get their goals met. Understanding the ideal customer journey is a crucial step in understanding your customer. By determining the ideal customer journey, you'll be able to remove impediments from it and streamline the whole customer lifecycle.

Identifying all Buyer Personas

There has been a lot of debate on the value of Buyer Personas after the advent of the Jobs-to-be-done framework. But, identifying buyer personas helps you understand all the people involved in buying, influencing, or deciding to purchase your product. This makes buyer personas one of the key elements in understanding your customers. Moreover, the best way to settle the debate is by making peace with the fact that you can't over understand the customer. So, it's better to keep it in the process.

Market Sizing

Market sizing is also one of the most crucial things to do to understand the customers. It consists of the total number of potential buyers of a product within a given market and the total revenue that these sales may generate. As important as market sizing may be, it shouldn't take priority or precedence over a customer value proposition.

Often, product managers use market sizing as a replacement for CVP. It must be understood that the customer value proposition and the Jobs-to-be-done framework provide deeper insights into customer goals and cannot be replaced with market sizing.

Conduct Customer Interviews and Feedback

While customer interviews and feedback might not be an ideal way to understand your customers, they cannot be struck off the list. You cannot understand your customers without talking about their past experiences with your product or similar products.

Document everything from video recordings of customer interviews to transcripts and summaries. Study them to understand customers' experiences and expectations. Keep at least ten interviews to ensure that your insights aren't inclined too much towards an individual's response.

Don't Give Up on the Supporting Material

If you follow the things mentioned in the checklist until now, you'll have a vivid picture of customers' needs and goals. But much like anything, it changes with time. You need to ensure that your product strategy and updates can keep up with these changes. Behavioral data will help you keep up with those changes by observing the actions of customers.

Studying your competitors and product substitutes also goes a long way in helping you make changes to your product and the overall product strategy. Design effective surveys and create focus groups to validate the results of your assessments about customer goals and check if they are still relevant.

To sum up, understanding your customer should be an extensive process wherein you gauge every aspect of your customer base. From knowing customer goals and ideal customer journey to identifying different buyer personas and the market size, make sure that you leave no stone unturned. To understand your customer well, you'll also need supporting material like interviews, surveys, feedback, etc., to fully understand your target customer base.

By following each of these tips, you will be able to ensure that you make informed decisions about the product that revolves around customers' needs and expectations.

DevOps in March: Everything #devs need to be aware of.

Abhishek — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 22:51:05 +0000

As the world went into lockdown, things have gone real tough for the devops engineers out there.

Excessive loads on data networks led companies to take desperate measures.

Rightly so, people seemed to be glued with their screens. Not that they're not glued otherwise.

The fact that meetings they stopped using their phones in are not happening, however, has added the extra dimension of loads.

This led Netflix to announce that they will be trying and work with their delivery teams to lower the usage by 25% without affecting the quality. Read more: https://yourstory.com/2020/03/coronavirus-youtube-netflix-facebook-bit-rate-network-congestion

Amid this chaos, teams yet to adopt DevOps have sure understood how wrong they have been. It's important for everyone to understand the impact of this delivery methodology.

Popular for its usage by developers building AI applications, Azure too went for prioritized resource allocation. Considering the gravity of the situation on a global level, it's hard not to appreciate this.

Having said that, creating a great set of tools and frameworks for AI developers has always been a priority for Azure and other cloud computing moguls. Read more: https://blog.unboxinnovations.com/python-for-artificial-intellingence-ml/

In other news, AWS has finally launched a new low-cost HDD storage option to Amazon FSx to Windows FileServer. Now, that's some news to jump on. Whether you need to manage a content management system or database at a departmental store, this HDD option will be ideal for all. Excited to see how things work out with this one.

That's all for this week's roundup. Be sure to check out next month's roundup.

Feel free to hit me up with any suggestions that you might have, or just leave a good-ol' comment down.

Stablecoins can help governments with Covid-19

Abhishek — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 05:51:00 +0000

As the threat of Covid-19 boldens, governments are now left with no option but to announce stimulus packages. The extent of uncertainty is nothing but crushing.

Amid this chaos, the probability of this stimulus reaching out to the target can be quite low. To solve this, stablecoins could be used.

Here's some reading about it:

Stablecoins for emergency coronavirus payments: https://www.coindesk.com/the-us-should-use-stablecoins-for-emergency-coronavirus-payments

Cryptocurrency for Governments: https://minddeft.com/blog/the-future-of-blockchain-technology-five-predictions-for-2025-part-1/

Happy Reading!

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