Product Lessons from Tally's founders
I stumbled upon this podcast recently -
While narrating the inception story of Tally, Bharat Goenka shared such beautiful anecdotes of his conversations with his father during the early days of development of the product that the my product-self was absolutely delighted. These anecdotes captured the most important lessons of product design in such an original manner.
I will share three of those in this blog. What I will do is that first, I will provide the context and then, will try to put down the exact words of Bharat Goenka from the podcast. This will not be the substitute to actually listening the podcast but I hope it acts as a written reference for anyone into product management and design.
Anecdote #1
Context: Shyam Sundar Goenka, the senior Goenka, was into textile mill-store manufacturing business. Owing to the interest of Bharat Goenka in programming, they got a IBM PC compatible. Since they had the computer, they thought that it can be used for their own business. So, they reached out to the software suppliers who were into the business of accounting software
All these software suppliers would come and they used to give a demo of their software. And my father would be sitting there, looking blankly at the screen and continuously saying - “But I don’t understand what you are doing”.
And the stock reply was roughly - “ That is the way computers work”.
To which my father’s reply was - “Look, when I buy a car, I want to be a driver, I don’t want to be a mechanic. See, I want to run my business, not your computer. You can keep saying this is the way computers work but I don’t care”.
Anecdote #2
Context: When they couldn’t find any easy-to-use software, the senior Goenka requested Bharat Goenka to give it a shot himself. The first demo of the program went for only 2 minutes. This is how it goes -
I started with a program. It came up on a screen. And I entered - T001 - it was the payment voucher. So I entered T001 and pressed enter. And I was about to enter the amount - and before I could enter the amount, he stopped me.
He said - “What is T001?”
I said - “It is the code name of travelling expenses”
“So, write travelling expenses.”
“No, you can’t write travelling expenses. Computers don’t understand English. They understand code”
“Now I don’t understand you. Before we started, you said that the computer doesn’t understand anything. Now you are telling it doesn’t understand English but it understands code. So, if you can help me understand what this whole thing is about, then maybe we can get past something.”
I chose my words carefully, saying that - “It is easier to write a program which understands code than to write a program which understands English.”
And he made such a fabulous statement - “Are you writing a program to make the life of a programmer easier or to make life of a user easier?”
Anecdote #3
Context: When Bharat Goenka’s father was finally able to use the program developed by him for the first time, he called one of the accountants to try out the product.
My father told - “This is going to be a test. Let’s see if she can use it.”
She came to the amount field. She started typing - 2,00,… As she typed coma, I stopped her.
“No, no, no - you don’t have to type the coma. In-fact, you should not type a coma. Because that is the general way you would enter something.”
Again, father stopped me. He said - “Do you think only we will use it or we should be able to give it to other people to use? It will be nice if others can also use it. Now, are you going to stand behind everyone and tell them what they can do and what they can’t do?”