Understated Hyperbole
I have long been a fan of Dharmesh Ba from the India Notes newsletter. So when he asked me to sit down for a conversation about my career, I jumped on the opportunity. What followed felt like opening a time capsule of my career – covering the heady days of game design at Zynga all…
I often find myself thinking about the Greek hero Odysseus (and NO – this is not one of those Elon Musk things where he claims he thinks about the Roman empire daily or how men supposedly think about the Roman empire multiple times a day. In the last year, I’ve only thought about the Roman…
The single biggest mistake every first-time manager makes in tech companies (especially product, design and engg) is in believing that they no longer have to contribute as ICs (individual contributors). It doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum of company size – a handful of people fighting for survival and trying to launch a…
Everything I have learnt about being an effective product manager condensed into a short video.
Product roadmaps typically need to have three important categories of initiatives: Work that helps to Keep the Lights On (KTLO) – tech debt, keeping existing features and functionalities up and running, fixing bugs, etc fall under this category. This is the bread and butter part of your roadmap. Short term investments – incremental improvements in…
The MVP is dead. The Minimum Viable Product philosophy has become corrupted. We have misunderstood its intent and diluted its core elements over the years. What we are left with is a superficial term, often thrown around in conversations around product building, with little to no understanding of the underlying principles. Sometimes the way to…
To say that I have followed an unconventional path to becoming a product manager is a little bit of an understatement. Engineering → Writing → Game Design → General Management → Product Management So one of the most frequent questions I get asked is: “how do I transition to a product management role?”. And while…