The Stickiness Trap
Most business advice and individual professional goals are to build moats. Create dependency. Turn your clients into cash cows. Thich Nhat Hanh said something that cuts against all of that. In his First Mindfulness Training,…
The Scarcity Illusion: Why We Hoard Features, Ideas, and Thoughts
There's a peculiar contradiction at the heart of how products get built. Startups obsess over shipping fast, every week without a new feature feels like falling behind. Meanwhile, the giants move with glacial, almost arrogant…
Designing for the User You Have, Or the User You Want
Every product team has a mental image of their user. The problem is that this image tends to be assembled from existing data; who are currently buying, what they currently do, what they currently say…
The Feature That Made It Worse
There is a quiet assumption embedded in most product roadmaps: that more capability means more value. It sounds reasonable. It rarely survives contact with actual users. Service Focus: In 2018, Snapchat redesigned its app with…
The Intellectual Humility of the Prototype
“Failure” is a verdict. A “prototype” is a question. That single re-frame changes everything. When we apply a design mindset to our own behaviour, setbacks stop being judgements and start becoming data. We observe rather…
Footwork, Footloose
Discover the Unconventional What does a traditional Ukrainian folk dance have to do with a 396–1 boxing record? In my book, Main Batata Hoon, I explore the fascinating story of Vasiliy Lomachenko, whose legendary dominance…
The Counterintuitive Truth about Innovating
Most people think innovation is about having brilliant ideas. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: ideas are arguably the easiest part of the entire process. The real work is before and after it. The most transformative products,…
A Conversation that Moves Things Forward, for Co-founders, Product Leaders, and Decision-Makers
There's a particular kind of problem that doesn't get solved in meetings. It sits with you, in the margins of a product review, in the pause before you answer a stakeholder's question, in the nagging…
My 2-hour virtual consults for Chief Product Officers and Service Leaders
Writing my books, Think Like an Innovator and Design the Future was, in many ways, an act of distillation; years of consulting work compressed into frameworks and principles that could travel further than I could.…
The Human Angle: Design Thinking
Every product you’ve ever loved was designed by someone who first tried to understand you. Not your demographic. Not your purchase history. You! Your frustrations, your workarounds, your unarticulated wishes. This is the engine behind…
The Innovation Thinking Sandwich
The world has massive problems with "cool" solutions that create even bigger disasters. From the 1950s, we solved convenience with plastic, and now we’re literally breathing it. We solved the fossil fuel headache with Electric…
Life is a Highway – 2
This was an amusing piece of news from this Monday where a corporator suggested imposing a London-style 'pay-to-drive' plan for South Mumbai in India. India has 4x the population of the US, sitting on 1/3rd…
Beyond the Bait and Hook
Book recommendation below. ;) I stumbled upon what initially seemed like an interestingly different fitness service on Instagram. A few clicks in though, it turned out to be the same old behavioural science playbook at…