Stop Fighting Your AC , You’re Losing
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…
Different Kitchens
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,…
The Chakravyuh Effect
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…
When the Room Agrees Too Quickly
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 Hit-Making Algorithm: Behavioural Design or Manipulation?
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…
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…