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,…
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 in the ring wasn’t built on punches alone, but on four foundational years of dance lessons, something his visionary father…
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, services, and systems in the world weren’t born from a single eureka moment. They were built through a disciplined process…
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 sense that the roadmap you’ve approved is logical but somehow not quite right. These problems aren’t unsolvable. They usually just…
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. But frameworks, by their nature, are general. Your product isn’t. Your users aren’t. And the specific tension between what your…