Serial Entrepreneur: Manoj Saxena (Part 5)

In this portion of our interview with Manoj we take a deeper look at the person behind the success. We delve into the individual traits which have built success.

SM: What is your own personal core competency? Is it engineering, is it sales, marketing?
MS: I would say that it’s a combination of product management and sales. My core competency is being able to study a market and identify some deep trends. Be able to anticipate the trend and start building products and technologies to intersect the trend. The second core competency, without being boastful, is having the ability to identify, hire and recruit world class talent.

SM: How do you think you developed the former skill set?
MS: I think a big part of it was the time I spent in 3M. Because my role in 3M for the first three years I was there was … they have this program where they hire three or four MBAs every year from different business schools around the country. They put you through a boot camp where you work with different general managers and vice presidents on a variety of problems dealing with new product launches, marketing, divestures or acquisitions. Typically people do two or three projects there . I think my average work load was seven projects over the three years I was there. I used to call it the 3M buffet table. Because 3M had something like 45 different business units. I think working on a lot of those and really sort of honing the skills because 3M is really such a new product innovation machine. I think the whole process of staying close to the customers, observing and anticipating the user’s needs, and going and building a product based on that is something that at 3M I really got to hone my skills.

SM: Do you normally envision a product the a customer is likely to need, or do you listen to customers and come up with your ideas?
MS: I think it’s a combination of both. A lot of it is anticipation of some technologies on the horizon that could solve some really deep problems a customer could have. I think it is a combination of selecting technologies and then applying it. So applied product management is probably a core competency as well.

SM: The reason I am drilling down into this is that if you listen to Steve Jobs, the customer can never tell you what product they want because they have no idea what is possible.
MS: Absolutely, absolutely. When I was in 3M I had done some work with Erick Jaun Hipple at MIT on this whole area called Lead User Innovation. The concept there is exactly what you said, that if you ask a customer you will never get the right answer, however, there is a very small minority of customers out there who are called Lead Users according to this framework that Juan Hipple has worked out. A Lead User is typically people who have such a strong need or pain that they go out and build something on there own to solve the pain. The goal of the process is to be able to identify those Lead Users, identify how they are solving their problem and bring it back and commercialize the product for the majority of the market and mass markets.

SM: How do you identify Lead Users?
MS: That is a whole discipline. For example in Webify, which I did in early 2002, I went and spent six months at Wells Fargo with Steve Ellis who’s a good friend and a VP at Wells Fargo. I used to just go and spend time there and talk to their architects and really understand what their issues were with their business in general. There were some very big problems that were still there. E-business technologies of 2002 were not solving it.

SM: What were specifically some of the nuggets from your Wells Fargo discussions.
MS: Actually the first Wells Fargo market we thought we would go after was a failure. I had to recalibrate the strategy to apply it to another market. The same technology but a different market.

In the case of Exterprise I started applying the technology to automated processes and diagnose problems for telecom networks. The same technology ended up applyicable in E-commerce. The first application area I started with didn’t pan out and was a failure, but I still kept the technology and applied it to a different segment with a similar need.

The same thing with Webify. We thought we would go after banking with this emerging technology called SOA, even though it was under different architectures. I realized that SOA had a lot of limitations that were with performance and security which would not make it a good candidate for banking. Therefore, we applied it to healthcare and insurance, and other verticals.

[Part 7]
[Part 6]
[Part 5]
[Part 4]
[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 5 in the series : Serial Entrepreneur: Manoj Saxena
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