Understated Hyperbole
A young girl wakes up in a daze. “Where is everyone?” She walks out of her room and searches her house. Her family is missing. She can hear some noise outside. She can also smell smoke. She picks up her dada’s old wooden sword and walks out of her house. The entire village is burning….
A lot has been written about defensibility and moats in businesses. Strategists talk about barriers to entry (resources, patentable technology and processes, expertise, capital) in certain businesses and why it is usually difficult for new entrants to disrupt incumbents. But one of the lesser-explored areas of defensibility is building products which have a high exit…
Over a meeting, someone recently asked me to describe the archetype of a product leader. While I answered the question, a broader thought stayed with me. What are the various archetypes of product managers? An archetype is a powerful storytelling device – making it easier for readers to identify and understand a concept. And PMs…
I have been going through a friend’s notes from his favourite classes at NYU’s Stern business school. The notes from Professor Glenn Okun’s classes stand out. There are a lot of insights in there. One of the things he talks about is value propositions. Okun posits that one cannot create value propositions. They are perceived…
People who build products and run them live learn some lessons the hard way. For example: speed and haste are not to be confused with each other. This is true in product management and it is definitely true in parenting. Ask any parent and they will tell you: putting a baby to sleep is a…
Recently, I was talking to a technologist I greatly admire about different approaches to problem-solving and product development. His argument (which I strongly agreed with) was that most design, technological and product development in India at the moment is sympathetic in nature and that this is a big problem. It needs to be empathetic. But…
Growing up – all the way to engineering school and beyond – I was obsessed with mathematical modelling and statistics. The ability to model (correctly) the predictive behaviour of a system (oftentimes a complex system that involves a fairly large number of variables) can seem like pure magic to an outsider (and is a whole…
I saw the Jon Favreau movie Chef the other night. Jon Favreau plays a celebrated chef called Carl Casper, who after receiving a particularly nasty review from a food critic suffers a spectacular meltdown in his restaurant that is captured for posterity on social media. He quits/ is fired from his job and goes on…