Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

We hear a lot about enterprise infrastructure, but what really goes into it? How do you meet the intricate needs of big corporations while making sure that your custom offerings make business sense?
Pavan Singh, VP of Product @ Lynx Technologies, and Aram discuss how to sensibly deploy enterprise infrastructure. They explore the technical and business sides of enterprise infrastructure. On the technical side, they talk about how to make software last for 10-15 years without needing major upgrades, how to make sure that enterprise software is secure and reliable, and why customer interviews are not enough. On the business side, you'll hear how to fulfil custom enterprise requests in a way that increases the overall capacity of your company, how to easily open a new revenue stream, and how to validate your big product ideas.

Show Notes

Follow Aram Melkoumov on Linkedin for highlight clips and DMs.


About Pavan Singh
Pavan Singh is the Vice President Of Product Management at Lynx Software Technologies where he works on enterprise infrastructure. He earned his MBA from the Kellog School of Business at Northwestern. Amongst other previous roles, he had a 6-year career at Cisco performing various leadership roles. If he wasn’t a product person, Pavan would want to be a public speaker.


SHOW NOTES:
00:00 | Who is Pavan Singh?
00:34 | What is enterprise infrastructure?
03:21 | Mission-critical edge: how to make software last for 15 years.
06:52 | Enterprise infrastructure vs. product management
09:10 | How to make SaaS products last longer
11:25 | Dealing with unexpected requests when building enterprise infrastructure
15:27 | Two ways enterprise infrastructure goes wrong
17:50 | Balancing white-glove offerings with startup growth
20:48 | How many big ideas should you focus on (and 3 ways to validate them)?
26:48 | Using partnerships to tap into easy revenue expansion
29:14 | Observing the customer vs. interviewing the customer
32:44 | Rapid fire questions: asking better questions, what to do instead of saying no, speed of innovation, in-person meetups, product innovation.

QUOTES:
[07:21] “Until a few generations of product back, it was okay that enterprise infrastructure product user experience wasn’t the best.  Now, it is no longer acceptable. Now the user experience of an enterprise infrastructure product really matters. And by user experience, I mean not just the UX but also APIs; the quality of APIs, how easily you integrate it with something else, does it comply with standards that make it easy for other products to be integrated?”
[24:31] “We never talk about how internal alignment is as important, if not more, when it comes to innovation. It has to be aligned with the capabilities of the company, the culture, and the operational processes - it has to be aligned with what the new idea is. And more than that, it becomes about people. Does the company have the right people who have done similar things and have the know-how?.”

Links We Mentioned:
Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996

Follow Pavan Singh
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavansingh/

Work with Crowdlinker:
https://www.crowdlinker.com/contact 

What is Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov?

Product Innovation Series is an in-depth interview series featuring product & innovation leaders from small startups all the way to Fortune 500 behemoths. Our guests share their battle-tested perspective on what prevents teams from shipping a great product.
The show is hosted by Aram Melkoumov, the CEO of Crowdlinker.