Sujai Shriram - How Travel Benefits Your Career

Sujai Shriram is a businessman and international traveler who enjoys exploring the world with his wife. Though the connection between travel and business is not immediately clear to all, those who delve into both, as Sujai Shriram does, are often rewarded with professional benefits.
The following are just some of the ways that traveling could boost your career potential:

 Bigger Picture – When you travel to unfamiliar land, you’re forced to look at the bigger picture. Many travelers report realizing that their problems are relatively small in comparison to the world, and this reduces stress. Seeing the bigger picture can also make it easier to prioritize, focus and do your best work.

Perspective and Values – Traveling will expose you to new cultures and, as a result, it will teach you to appreciate other perspectives and values. For example, in some European countries, it is more common to talk to the strangers around you when you are on a bus than it is to idle on a cell phone. This can teach you to embrace other people and, as a result, network better with colleagues.

Meet New People – Whenever you’re away from home, you have the opportunity to meet new people. Not only does this help you make friends and view the world in a more positive light, but it helps you network. You never know when your international friends will become business partners.

As you travel, you will find small things that you enjoy about it and, hopefully, you will also see your professional standing benefit. In the end, though, dedicated travelers like Sujai Shriram typically adventure for personal pleasure over all else.
​

Sujai Shriram - Product Manager Tips

Sujai Shriram, a CrossView Inc. employee, has product management experience that makes him appealing as a professional asset and that might eventually aid his entrepreneurial pursuits. Product management is rarely something that comes naturally, even to pros like Sujai Shriram. It takes of years of rigorous experimentation, hands-on learning and an unquenchable thirst to learn and improvise.

Below you will find brief explanations of key tips than can help you grasp the role of product manager…

• Know the Product – Knowing the product that you are managing improves your credibility and your value to the organization or client. When someone has a question about the product, you want to be the one that they instinctively come to. This means taking time to know the features and business rules of each product thoroughly, no matter how much research it requires. Additionally, product managers should maintain a document outlining the product that can be used to explain each feature. 
• Know the Market – Your competitors and the existing market can serve as your most valuable sources of information, if you take the time to learn about them. Keep up with the latest news from your competition in your market, know what is and isn’t working for them, and apply what you learn to your own product.
• Develop Relationships – Product managers often work with functional teams to achieve goals, and if you have good relationships with all involved parties, you can better navigate needs. Network, be helpful and develop positive relationships whenever possible.

The advice above hardly exemplifies the amount of research and learning done by seasoned businesspeople like Sujai Shriram. It is, however, a good place to start. 

Sujai Shriram - Basic Project Management Phases

Sujai Shriram is a Project Manager and a digital marketer working with CrossView Inc. He is experienced in management and leadership positions, but careful professionals like Sujai Shriram often review the basics of their roles on a regular basis. This allows them to stay focused and avoid obvious mistakes.

If you’ve been tasked with project management, consider the basic phases of your upcoming duties. This will give you direction whether you’re a seasoned pro or an office newbie.

1. Definition. To create a solution, it is important to understand and define the problem clearly. That’s 80% of the work. A project manager will often bring the team together to create a goal, define clear milestones, map out a schedule and reconcile/identify key resources need to guide the project successfully to completion.

2. Design. Once the problem is well defined, the solution design begins. It starts with laying out the high level building blocks, how they interact and potential risks. As the project team dives deeper in to each of the areas, carefully negotiation of conflicting design aspects and risk-mitigation helps the team evolve the solution to an optimal level that achieves the goals of the project.

3. Execution. Execution is everything. It makes or breaks the success of any project team. A project manager’s role is to ensure the team is clear on the goal and has no roadblocks to progress. During this phase, all team members are typically filled in on any remaining project information so that everyone is on the same page. If a project trends to go off-track, and almost always will as long humans are involved in execution, the work of the project manager and her leadership task begins.

4. Launch. Once the solution is developed and well tested, it can be rolled out in several ways. It can be a big-bang launch to the entire audience, or launched as a pilot to a subset of the customer base to test out and gather their feedback. With the pressures of today’s market demands of speed-to-market and high quality outputs, organizations are increasingly adopting pilot launches to minimize their risks.

You can likely find a professional with experience similar to Sujai Shriram’s who will be willing to have a mentorship conversation over coffee, if asked. Mentor relationships can develop into valuable career connections, if handled correctly.
​

Sujai Shriram - Career Planning

Sujai Shriram, a Project Manager with CrossView Inc., is a digital marketer who is currently building his career. Like many professionals, Sujai Shriram hopes to improve the world through his future endeavors, and his career plan could allow him the chance to do just that.

Making a career plan can feel like the most difficult part of creating a reliable, professional path, but if you simplify it, you’ll be on track in no time. The following tips will help get you started:

• Make it a Holiday – Scheduling an annual “holiday” to work on your career plan can help you remember to keep it up to date. A career planning holiday gives you an entire day to think about where your life is and what you want to do with it. Plus, it allows you to involve those close to you in your plans (if you would like to make sure that two career paths coincide, for example).
• Map Back – Tracing the path your career has taken allows you to look at what you’ve done and what you wish you had handled better. This can be useful, as hindsight is often clearer than your present view. Take time to reflect, and apply insights gained to your upcoming steps.
• Examine – Career planning is a good time to examine your hobbies and pastimes. Some of the most successful careers are built from a hobby that a person is passionate about. Most hobbies can be turned into careers and, even if you don’t want to do that with yours, you can often gain insight for future career paths from what you do in your downtime.
• Note Your Accomplishments – When you look back at what you’ve done, don’t forget to take note of your accomplishments. Keep a record of what you have achieved, add your accomplishments to your resume and consider them when you refine your career plan.
• Look Beyond the Present – It’s easy to get wrapped up in your current professional position, but looking to the future is often more useful. Examine the skills that you are gaining from your present profession and consider how they can be used in future jobs.
• Keep it Flexible – If you’ve worked in one field for years, you might feel like switching would hinder you, but it’s good to stay flexible. Look at growing fields and other areas that interest you. Even if you don’t want to switch now, taking note of your options can keep you from becoming myopic.

When professionals like Sujai Shriram make a career plan, they often approach it intuitively. This allows them to customize their paths in ways that work for them. The above tips do not need to be seen as rigid rules, but they can serve as guidelines for those who need them.
​

The Value of Travelling with a Spouse

Spending the rest of your life with someone else is a magnificent life journey, and it allows both you and your spouse to grow into each other, and build a life out of the things that you both create together. There are many tools that help build the intimacy and connection in a marriage. One of the most effective ways to increase that connection and forge a bond is through travel. Leaving the dull habits of everyday life and taking the time to explore, discover, and make new memories with your spouse will not only make your lives happier together, but also give you the personal opportunity to see the wonders and sights of the world.

Sujai Shriram

It is the element of adventure and exploring the unknown that makes this so fun. Both of you are being given the opportunity to discover something together that neither of you have seen, making the memory something to share forever. There is so much out there in the world to discover, and each memory isn’t made the same way. Thousands of couples make their way to popular tourist sites and enjoy it the way they are made to, increasing their passion for their life as well as their spouse. This could be your adventure, and all it takes is making the decision. Sujai Shriram travels with his wife often, and continues to explore the world with her as much as he can. They have been to Canada, Europe, India, and the US, making numerous memories that will last a lifetime.
​

The Triangle of Choice within Project Management

We have to make several choices every day; from the minute we open our eyes until they are shut at night. While each choice we make may not define us permanently, some are more impactful than others. Retailers use the world of e-commerce to tailor their products and product placements to make these difficult choices. As a project manager working on solving complex technology and e-commerce problems, the three decisions every retail company has to make are how fast, how good, and how cheap their eCommerce can be. The challenge lies in defining and determining which of the three are priorities. As a digital commerce professional, Sujai Shriram enjoys asking the right questions to help companies make these choices on an everyday basis.
​

Sujai Shriram

Omni-Channel Commerce - Strengthening the Bond between Brand and Shopper

People around the world enjoy shopping, whether they stroll through an outlet mall, gallivant in an expensive downtown area, or snatch a great sale online. Retailers do their best to attract a large number of customers in each of these avenues of shopping. However, there are still some challenges with seamlessly transitioning through each of these avenues for the best customer experience.

Sujai Shriram

How many times have you tried to cancel an order, but the call center representative could not help you because you couldn't remember your order number? How many times have you ordered a size too small or too large but had to jump through hoops before you could return it and get what you want? How many times have you or your friends have stood in long lines on Thanksgiving to buy something you love but just wanted a better price? Not to mention, cold November, people pushing each other and even dying in a stampede! Didn't we start by saying people enjoy shopping? I can't help but pause and ponder if there is a better way. There has to be, right? The solution is Omni-channel commerce.

So what is Omni-channel commerce? Simply put, it is a philosophy that every shopping experience is an intimate interaction between one shopper and one brand at any given time; and in order to provide the best shopping experience, the retailer needs to understand their customer and service them regardless of "how" the shopping occurred. As technology mediums expand, the shopping experience starts in one channel, say a brick and mortar store, but spans across multiple channels, including mobile, tablet, or desktop website. This is where technology steps in to figure out how this whole experience can not just be seamless, but also painless and enjoyable. Hard numbers underscore the importance of this smooth, seamless transition. According to Get Elastic, based on surveys conducted by Shopify, eConsultancy, and CPC Strategy, a whopping 67.5% of the shoppers who add an item to their cart, abandon it before completing the sale. In digital marketing terms, this is called Abandonment rate. Any digital marketer would agree that keeping this abandonment rate low is a crucial component of their eCommerce strategy. Abandonment indicates that someone came to your online store, familiarized themselves with your products or searched for one specifically, and went as far as adding something to their cart, but then decided not to purchase it. Consider this - how many times do you walk into a grocery store, pick up the items you want and then leave the store without purchasing those items? In eCommerce, the abandonment rate is a powerful indicator to understanding what caused a shopper to not complete their shopping. For example, the same survey GetElastic also revealed that about two-thirds of shoppers left their carts hanging because their retailer was bound to charge them for returns. By conducting a cost-benefit analysis and, if possible, making an adjustment to the return policy to either reduce the charge or make it free, you could make a highly positive impact on your bottom line.

These are the sorts of problems Sujai Shriram loves to solve. As a digital marketing expert in the world of eCommerce, Sujai Shriram lives and breathes omni-channel commerce. His company’s specialized focus enables them to provide the entire breadth of services, along with the depth of knowledge and experience needed, to devise and execute a powerful and impactful digital commerce solution for each retail customer.
​