Skip to main content

Saas Applications and Manuals?

Software Manuals anyone? Who reads them?  For interactive products like Video games or phones, who reads them?  My 4 year son started using iPad like a pro and now he even tells me this is PBS kids and this is netflix.  When I got an iPhone I never read a manual and havent so far for last 2 years.  As Kids we never read manual for video games. The game developers just made level1 easier and you learn as you play and get better.

Recently I had a chance to compare two APM tools AppDynamics and NewRelic at a large scale at my employer and both took me 5 min to setup and get going. But what sold me to NewRelic was their ability to deliver value without doing any additional configuration. Their Level1 itself had so many aha moments that it sold me immediately.  Dont get me wrong, Appdynamics is a very  powerful APM tool but you have to configure it, tweak it like an ERP solution to get value out of it, it felt so 1990s. In past 3 months I never got enough time to tweak and configure Appdynamics.  Whereas NewRelic felt more like a game where you configure this plugin and you get more value and you use this view and you get things to optimize and this continued on.

We are soon realizing the limitations of NewRelic and now I have to read manuals to configure it and tweak it to get more value out of it but its a Sunk Cost theory and I would try to live with it as not me but everyone in team has invested in it. So I would now try to Configure AppDynamics to get advanced things that NewRelic cant.

In short the lesson to be learnt is now a days no one likes to read manuals and millennials need instant gratification. I occasionally do read manuals but only when you are dealing with very custom thing like Configure an active directory or configure custom instrumentation or you want to use advanced options of sed or awk or using a totally new tool or api that is not intuitive like credit card processing.

In real life there are many things where I read manuals like assembling a wood furniture because once you have put the screw in wrong place you are toast so you have to be careful. But when it comes to using software applications the unconscious bias is always to play with it without reading plethora of documentation as what can go wrong, you can always retry it.  When designing Saas products if you can make it a game there is a very good chance of higher conversion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adventures of a nature lover - 5 national parks in 14 days

To unplug from work and recharge myself I do a 2-3 week trip every year where I am unplugged. Few of the reasons I can totally unplug from work is Unlimited Vacation policy of Egnyte,  Excellent support by the Infrastructure team  Our ethos of pro-actively fixing issues before they become nuisance. TLDR; It's a long post so you can scroll down and first see see images if you need motivation to read it entirely. Me and my family like national parks and camping to recharge us as there is no cell phone  coverage in parks and you are completely unplugged from technology most of the times. We have done many of the national parks nearby and this year we want to see glacier national park as the glaciers may disappear in 10-15 years so see them before they are gone. Behind every successful trip is a "Trip planner" and for our family its my wife, she researched  and made a trip itinerary book. She booked camp sites 6 months in advance She researched trails and
2 comments
Read more

Embracing "Deep Work" for productivity

Do you have that feeling where you worked all day but at the end it feels like you got nothing done?  In past 7 years at Egnyte to reduce burnout every 6 months to an year I have to fight this constant productivity battle. I have accumulated several habits in the process to increase productivity, some of them are:- Give yourself scheduled time: Allocate 3 hours for creative work, I had my calendar open whole day and I would get interviews and meeting scheduled randomly all over the day. When you are on a maker's schedule this is disastrous. I recently allocated 3 hours of calendar time and I reject meeting invite unless its absolutely urgent and I am contributing to it. Walk in middle of the day: by the middle of the day brain feels tired and I cant code or focus so I started 30 min walk. I tried listening to podcast or listening music on the walk but that felt more work so I stopped doing it. I just walk and think on the current problem on hand. 5 minute rule: If you can finis
1 comment
Read more

IPhone will beat DSLR in long run

I started taking interest in photography recently and have accumulated a decent amount of gear but I am realizing that the ease of taking out your phone and clicking picture will beat the DSLR in long run. A friend recently visited me from NY and we wanted to take a family picture and I was setting up Tripod and Flash and doing settings changes and he was like leave all this, lets take a Selfie and that’s it, in 2 second the picture was done and he shared it on facebook in another 1 second.  Now one can argue that DSLR would have clicked a better picture but DSLR has many things going against it:- Learning curve : I must have spent 200+hours on reading about photography but still cant take decent pictures as my bar is high. Not everyone is interested in spending this much time. Amount of gear to be carried : On hikes its a pain to carry your DSLR whereas your phone has to be anyway with you. Cognitive effort of tweaking the gear: You have to have a different lens/settings for diffe
2 comments
Read more