This brilliant idea is for political ministers anywhere in the world who approve of infrastructure or crony capitalist projects that involve the mass removal of trees, which have an obvious, adverse impact on the area (spike in temperatures, removal of mangroves leaving the area prone to storms, soil erosion and flooding). Especially those ministers whose…
In the recent years, I have been using AI a lot more than I might have intended to. And yet, I noticed that personal projects were moving slower than I would have liked them to. It got me wondering what might be the reason. And, as obvious as it might seem, the current conclusion is…
As much as I love mental models, most of us barely use them, or even know we’re using them. What is a mental model. Simply put, it’s our perspective of how something is or works, or should be or should work. Speaking of, you might wonder, as I did, if a mental model is just…
Many writers know the effort that goes into anchoring a complex, slow-cooked thought in a reader’s mind. When an idea grows deep and layered, our instinct is to hunt for a metaphor, a cognitive bridge that will help our reader cross to our side. Most metaphors are functional. A rare few are functional and brilliant…
We all talk a lot about emotional resilience. But there’s an aspect nobody quite names. When life lands a punch, be it in the form of a promotion that goes to someone else, a relationship that quickly spirals or quietly sours, a boss who makes Mondays feel like a punishment, the instinct isn’t to steady…
Think of the last time you sat in a parked car. Not a cab or an Uber, your own car, or a friend’s, or a relative’s. Given how punishing the heat is across most of India right now, chances are you reached straight for the AC dial and turned it all the way down to…
There’s a useful way to understand the difference between a corporate manager and an entrepreneur. Picture a MasterChef kitchen. The manager is told which dish to prepare. There are people everywhere: leadership priorities, team dynamics, cross-functional politics, and the recipe may change three times before it’s plated. The dish does eventually get done, and looking…
There is this behavioural pattern; I’ll call it the ‘Chakravyuh Effect.’ It occurs when parents hold one set of rules for their children while having lived by another, failing to communicate the intentionality behind their own choices. In India, it’s not uncommon to meet couples who had a love marriage but quietly oppose the idea…
There is a particular kind of meeting that should make any product leader nervous: the one where everyone agrees. Anyone who has led a project of moderate complexity knows the exact opposite situation well enough; the loud, confident voices that slow everything down without moving anything forward. Those that offer shallow alternatives with great conviction,…
There is something quietly telling about how modern songs are put together. The average English song repeats its central hook three to four times. More recently though, that number seems to have crept up to ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty. This isn’t just a modern creative trend. It exploits a behavioural principle called mere-exposure effect. The…
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, he said: don’t get too attached to these teachings. Use them as a tool, then move forward. It’s fascinating when…
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 confidence. Apple can sit on a feature for years, release it quietly, and users treat the tardiness as curation and…
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 they need. That is a reasonable starting point. However, it becomes a dangerous one the moment the team mistakes it…
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 stated intention of making it easier to use, separating friend content from publisher content, reorganising the interface, adding algorithmic…
“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 than condemn. We iterate rather than retreat. The same detachment and curiosity that a designer brings to an early sketch,…