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,…
Category: Improve
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…
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…
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…
Innovation: Don’t Let Frameworks become Cages
We have a strange fascination with frameworks. I certainly do. A framework is a visual shortcut that offers a bird's-eye view of a complex idea. It helps us find our bearings when we're overwhelmed by…
What Design Thinking gets wrong about Empathy
Here's something that might sound strange coming from someone who's spent years in innovation and design: I'm not always empathetic. And neither are you. There's this perception in the design world that innovators, designers, and…
The Questions We Don’t Ask: How Problem Framing Determines Solution Quality
I often wonder about how we frame problems (challenges, as I prefer to call them), and more importantly, how that single decision can ripple out for decades, sometimes centuries. Back in the 1950s, the consumer…
Customer is KingDesign ThinkingDTEverydayHuman BehaviourImproveInnovateLife or something like itThe known unknown
When Did We Stop Designing for Humans?
In the past year, customer experience has taken a real nosedive. Big brand products and services making baffling choices. Let's start with recent Panasonic/Google TVs. With any TV including the good old ones, adjust the…
Small Details, Better Reading Experience
Notion Press has helped me with all three of my books, and for that I remain grateful to their team. For my latest, Think like an Innovator, me being me, I took on a new…
The Return to Innocence
A lot of people go from lighthearted when young to bitter and caustic or indifferent as they get older. They might remain adequately friendly and cheerful in public, knowing well not to cross boundaries or…
Gimme Your Best Question!
A few days ago, I shared how one re-framed question unlocked a breakthrough solution for a pediatric hospital project, and opened up a contest for you to share YOUR transformational questions. I've been thinking about…
The Timing Paradox: Why Rating Your Driver Is Harder Than It Seems, and when 5 Stars isn’t quite Honest
After an Uber or Ola ride, the app asks you to rate your driver. Simple enough. But when should that prompt appear? Ask too soon, and users hesitate. Some worry the driver might instantly receive…
A Coupon Code for my Potato Book
My "potato book" was feeling left out with all the posts and coupons for the two design thinking books. So here's a coupon for Main Batata Hoon, a collection of short stories written in a…