Software People Stories

In this episode, my co-host Gayatri continues her conversation with Dan Balcauski, founder and chief pricing officer at product tranquility, a company that helps high-volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products

Gayatri asked him what challenges he faced when he became a consultant

Dan shares

• How he did a solo backpacking around the world and the transformational experiences he got
• How he had to talk himself away from self-talk that would shoot any ideas for entrepreneurship
• Wanting to explore a ‘brain for hire’ model, to see if he could sell his expertise
• Validating the niche to be in - of SaaS pricing advisory
• Why he did not consider a model of being a fractional product manager role, as a consultant
• What some of the inflexion points in his career have been
• How he has been able to support global clients, remotely
• His advice for young professionals who want to take up product management as a career

Dan Balcauski, the founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility, dispels B2B SaaS Pricing Illusions.

Dan is an expert in helping high-volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products. He has 15 years of experience managing multiple products throughout their life cycles, from start-ups to publicly traded multinationals. A fun fact about him: before founding the company, he took a sabbatical and completed a solo, round-the-world expedition to 21 countries.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/balcauski/

In this episode, my co-host Gayatri is in conversation with Dan Balcauski, founder and chief pricing officer at product tranquility, a company that helps high-volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products

In this conversation he talks about

• His student days in 1999, the peak dotcom era
• Got a job in Austin, Texas
• Getting into engineering manager role, which included envisioning product roadmaps
• Developing an interest in articulating value of solutions 
• Signing up for an MBA and doing work on pricing
• Seeing some of the mistakes made by others during mergers and acquisitions
• Setting up his company about 4 years ago
• How he learns from other experts and books
• His views and recommendations on pricing and inflation
• The impact of Covid on pricing patterns in hardware and software

Listen on!

• Gayatri asked him what challenges he faced when he became a consultant

The answer to that question and a lot more interesting stuff in the next episode.

Dan Balcauski, the founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility, dispels B2B SaaS Pricing Illusions.

Dan is an expert in helping high-volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products. He has 15 years of experience managing multiple products throughout their life cycles, from start-ups to publicly traded multinationals. A fun fact about him: before founding the company, he took a sabbatical and completed a solo, round-the-world expedition to 21 countries.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/balcauski/

I continue my conversation with Shailaja Venkatasubramanyan.

In the first part, she talks about how she got into Information systems and her career spanning education and startup sectors. 

How she balanced professional and personal demands and challenges.

How she never hesitated to get into new areas and was always ready to learn.

In this part of the conversation Shai talks about

• Differences in teaching approaches for young adults and children
• How she likes to learn when she is interested in a topic, and not for grades etc
• People learn best when they are invested in it
• I bring a lot of enthusiasm, by being funny and a pinch of entertainment
• Giving interesting assignments (designing assignments that I would want to do)
• Also taught a strategy class: lot of case studies, that had a lot of learning value
• One of the aspects to address in teaching is to manage short attention spans
• How teamwork is important even in academic courses
• Trends and concerns related to Evolving Knowledge management
• Her career tips

Shailaja "Shai" Venkatsubramanyan is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the School of Information Systems and Technology at San Jose State University (SJSU), where she has taught and researched for over 15 years. She has a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems (MIS) from the University of Arizona, and is a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar and a Master Teacher Award recipient.

Shai is passionate about using technology and data to solve real-world problems and to make the world a better place. She has also worked as a General Manager at theCoderSchool, a franchise that teaches coding and programming skills to kids and teens, and as a Knowledge Engineer at Kanisa, a Silicon Valley start-up that developed innovative solutions for online customer service. She has expertise in MIS, data analysis, databases, online customer service, and coding education. She enjoys writing, teaching, and learning about various topics related to MIS and beyond.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shailaja-venkatsubramanyan-b47742

I am in conversation with Shailaja Venkatasubramanyan, who is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the School of Information Systems and Technology at San Jose State University. She is also a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar and a Master Teacher Award recipient.

A special note on this episode: during this conversation Shailaja talks about some very personal moments in her life that some may find disturbing or moving.

In this conversation, she talks about:

• Wanting to do science, but was influenced to take up commerce
• Encouraged by her mother, choosing to study accounting in the USA
• Taking up courses in Information systems and computer science
• Being encouraged by a professor to take up PhD in information science and getting a PhD in Management Information Systems
• Finding herself amidst engineers and how she got over the initial fears
• Taking up a teaching job at Tulane University, but leaving that after a year to take up a position with a startup in California
• How she had to do literally a cross country trip one weekend a month for one more semester
• Enjoying the work culture in a startup, till they decided to start a family
• Moving to San Jose State university after a first meeting at a Starbucks
• The hectic and intense pace of life, juggling work and family, with an incident at home that needed help from the Fire department
• Realizing that it is best to focus on one thing at a time
• Going through a tough phase personally, with family health challenges
• Facing some unfair situations and harassment at work
• Not getting an empathetic hearing from seniors
• How all these experiences made her more patient
• Wanting to spend more time with her ailing father, choosing to pause her career and focus on family
• Feeling happy about her choices as she has a sense of overall satisfaction
• How she was able to find her niche, and differentiate her strengths, particularly when among others with more technical backgrounds
• An example was about learning what she needed to know for processing satellite data

Shailaja "Shai" Venkatsubramanyan is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the School of Information Systems and Technology at San Jose State University (SJSU), where she has taught and researched for over 15 years. She has a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems (MIS) from the University of Arizona, and is a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar and a Master Teacher Award recipient.

Shai is passionate about using technology and data to solve real-world problems and to make the world a better place. She has also worked as a General Manager at theCoderSchool, a franchise that teaches coding and programming skills to kids and teens, and as a Knowledge Engineer at Kanisa, a Silicon Valley start-up that developed innovative solutions for online customer service. She has expertise in MIS, data analysis, databases, online customer service, and coding education. She enjoys writing, teaching, and learning about various topics related to MIS and beyond.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shailaja-venkatsubramanyan-b47742

This is a continuation of the conversation with Kishore Kumar.

• He talks about how he started his youtube channel and trigger for his interest on astronomy after ending his formal professional career
• He talks about how he prepares , be it scripting, location , photography, tools for animation, java scripts and creativity to produce one episode on his channel.
• His views on “Time” before and after astronomy in his life.
• If you want time for something you will find it.
• His advice or tips on career questions

Kishore Kumar is a youtuber with a unique youtube channel called @ahargana. This channel has the singular purpose of explaining the astronomical basis of the Hindu panchanga using custom-built planetary orbital simulations.

Kishore was not always a youtuber. In his previous avatar, Kishore was a software professional for over thirty five years playing a variety of roles from programmer to program manager, general manager and vice president in leading companies such as Tata Unisys, Cognizant and Siemens. He has earned a masters degree in computer science from SUNY at Buffalo, USA and a bachelors degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from NIT Trichy. A lifelong self-learner, Kishore has leveraged all his learnings from his education and professional experience in the making of @Ahargana and contrary to appearance, considers it an entirely logical continuation of his life journey.

Kishore may be reached at:

Email: [email protected]

Youtube: youtube.com/@ahargana 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kishoresridharakumar

Kishore Kumar is a software professional turned youtuber. He shares his career journey with Sivaguru

• Starting career as system engineer later moved to programing on mainframes 
• Moving to the USA and feeling the need of studies did his Masters in computer science . Learning AI way back in 1989 to 1991. How this helped later in his career
• How his career mirrors the Indian software industry which has changed shapes over years. 
• How things changed from convincing the US for jobs to how later their trust on Indians helped increase workflow.
• Moving from service to product company
• His views on handling ambiguous requirements in old and new software development cycles
• Influencing teams with his systematic approach/process
• Talks about his personal transition while transitioning professionally

Kishore Kumar is a youtuber with a unique youtube channel called @ahargana. This channel has the singular purpose of explaining the astronomical basis of the Hindu panchanga using custom-built planetary orbital simulations.

Kishore was not always a youtuber. In his previous avatar, Kishore was a software professional for over thirty five years playing a variety of roles from programmer to program manager, general manager and vice president in leading companies such as Tata Unisys, Cognizant and Siemens. He has earned a masters degree in computer science from SUNY at Buffalo, USA and a bachelors degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from NIT Trichy. A lifelong self-learner, Kishore has leveraged all his learnings from his education and professional experience in the making of @Ahargana and contrary to appearance, considers it an entirely logical continuation of his life journey.

Kishore may be reached at:

Email: [email protected]

Youtube: youtube.com/@ahargana

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kishoresridharakumar

In the second part of the podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Mathan Ramanujam, Product Influencer and Hardware Designer and Director at SiMa.ai, shares his career journey

• Mathan shares on values on why would you work in a startup - Working for today’s salary or invest in tomorrow’s growth 
• He also shares matching personal believes in the firm and extracting learning from failures and failure in itself 
• Talks about each person needs to think of themselves as an IC irrespective of product or service world
• Mathan shares his customer to customer philosophy - Ensuring that customer need from marketing to end product launch - Development and productisation and sales & customer desk to the customer
• Putting onself in the fray in the various roles - shares learning to put oneself in the same role 
• Shares his experience in doing a verification in two different decades
• Mathan shares how his Contacts have helped in getting Contracts 
• Creating your own psychological safety and how one can create that in the team with 8-15 years
• How can you build high potential people by building safe environment for failure as well as skill building
• Mathan shares how he relates to being system centric and hence able to manage community between hardware and software and thus being successful in the embedded industry 

Mathan Ramanujam is the director in SIMa.ai. SiMa.ai™ is a machine learning company delivering the industry’s first software-centric purpose-built MLSoC™ platform. Mathan is a front-runner, growing high performance team ground-up! He’s is using his versatile nature and cross-functional experience to to build CoE for Infrastructure IPs for ML SoC, while Challenging himself to learn ML/AI.

Mathan has over 27 years of total industry experience with 17+ years of Team responsibilities. Mathan has taken multiple Si from concept to production, specialized in Digital design, with FPGA in the semiconductor industry. Mathan started his career in Atlaz Telecom and moved to the bay area for Arasan Chip Systems Inc.in the role of USB Device, Ethernet controller and XGMII IP development - RTL. 

Mathan later moved back to India took up team leadership roles in Nokia, Texas Instruments, QualComm, Western Digital and STMicroelectronics. 

Mathan Ramanujam has done his B.Tech in Bharathidasan University in Electronics and Communication Engineering. 

 Mathan can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathan-ramanujam-4495082/ 

In the first part of the podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Mathan Ramanujam, Product Influencer and Hardware Designer and Director at SiMa.ai , shares his career journey

• Mathan started his journey as a hardware engineer at Atlaz Telecom and identified that creating 
• Mathan’s growth can be traced very similar to Moore’s law - shares experiences on how tools, circuitry and semiconductor industry has exponential world and how he has adapted himself
• System on the chip  or SoC is the trend that’s making hardware 
• Mathan realised his skill in building relationship and ability to deliver in the operational and later strategic roles
• He shares a few stories on being a product influencer and being invited to be part of panels on SoC and verification
• Harnessing the team members strength and learning from them and ensure that the value is being always delivered
• Mathan shares stories on enabling people not different from learning to swim by giving a moving target and in the end people recognizing themselves
• Mathan talks about how he has ability to tell stories and discovered it 
• Mathan shares a crumple zone as a story - End zone in view 
• Story on moving from US to India and shares his experiencing of supporting his family
• Mathan shares India’s cities that are opening up for the embedded and hardware design 

Mathan Ramanujam is the director in SIMa.ai. SiMa.ai™ is a machine learning company delivering the industry’s first software-centric purpose-built MLSoC™ platform. Mathan is a front-runner, growing high performance team ground-up! He’s is using his versatile nature and cross-functional experience to to build CoE for Infrastructure IPs for ML SoC, while Challenging himself to learn ML/AI.

Mathan has over 27 years of total industry experience with 17+ years of Team responsibilities. Mathan has taken multiple Si from concept to production, specialized in Digital design, with FPGA in the semiconductor industry. Mathan started his career in Atlaz Telecom and moved to the bay area for Arasan Chip Systems Inc.in the role of USB Device, Ethernet controller and XGMII IP development - RTL. 

Mathan later moved back to India took up team leadership roles in Nokia, Texas Instruments, QualComm, Western Digital and STMicroelectronics. 

Mathan Ramanujam has done his B.Tech in Bharathidasan University in Electronics and Communication Engineering.  

Mathan can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathan-ramanujam-4495082/ 

Matt Genovese Founder and CEO of Planorama Design continues his conversation with Chitra and shares his thoughts on-

• Writing effective stories or work behind defining the requirements 
• Working in collaboration with the development team, discussing the challenges of an API
• Issues working with IOT projects and hardware have synchronous issues and different hardware failures
• What failures to take care of and what can be ignored
• Importance of functional verification
• Along with writing user stories, discovery and thinking is also important
• Whole process of discovering problems, asking questions, naturally brings the right people in 
• How diagrams help all the stakeholders understand/Visualize the flow together
• How and when a design sprint happens
• His message to someone who is aspiring hardware or software careers

–Matt Genovese is the founder and CEO of Planorama Design, bringing over 25 years of career experience in high-tech, spanning semiconductors, hardware, IoT, IT, and software product development. He has a strong track record of planning, launching, and shipping products that work. Matt’s company, Planorama Design, is a software user experience design professional services company, designing complex, technical software that is simple and intuitive to use. Staffed with seasoned engineers and user experience (UX) designers, the company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA.

Matt earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He began his career at Motorola-Freescale Semiconductor in product & test engineering and moved into design verification of RISC processors and SoCs. Matt has also held product leadership roles for complex and technical software development. As a result of his deep professional experience, Matt strives to “get it right the first time” starting with the software application’s user experience design, down to the hardware at the bottom of the stack. Planorama helps drive product development processes that create products that work out of the gate.

Social Media Handles:

• Way to reach Matt : https://planorama.design/podcast/
• Join AI Product Hive – an AI-focused Community for Product Managers, Designers, and Development Teams (Slack)  https://aiproducthive.com/

Matt Genovese Founder and CEO of Planorama Design shares how he -

• Started learning programming as a kid on 8-bit computers
• Founding Planorama Design, software experiments
• Impact of dinner table conversations around trigonometry, tinkering and electronics projects
• Need to know “why”, diving inside the black box, having the freedom to take things apart to learn
• Working at Motorola, from fabrication to production, moving into functional design and verification for SoC for Power PC based RISC processors
• Points of view on the cost of releasing bugs
• Bringing design into software engineering, getting requirements right to build the right product
• Focus on delivering hi-fidelity requirements for software engineers to do a great job, reduce time to deliver a quality product

Matt Genovese is the founder and CEO of Planorama Design, bringing over 25 years of career experience in high-tech, spanning semiconductors, hardware, IoT, IT, and software product development. He has a strong track record of planning, launching, and shipping products that work. Matt’s company, Planorama Design, is a software user experience design professional services company, designing complex, technical software that is simple and intuitive to use. Staffed with seasoned engineers and user experience (UX) designers, the company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA.

Matt earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He began his career at Motorola-Freescale Semiconductor in product & test engineering and moved into design verification of RISC processors and SoCs. Matt has also held product leadership roles for complex and technical software development. As a result of his deep professional experience, Matt strives to “get it right the first time” starting with the software application’s user experience design, down to the hardware at the bottom of the stack. Planorama helps drive product development processes that create products that work out of the gate.

Social Media Handles:

• Way to reach Matt : https://planorama.design/podcast/
• Join AI Product Hive - an AI-focused Community for Product Managers, Designers, and Development Teams (Slack)

URL:  https://aiproducthive.com/