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…
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 world’s most beloved designs, and it has a name: empathy. Not the soft, feel-good kind, but the rigorous, observational,…
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 Vehicles, only to hand the next generation nightmare fields the toxic battery disposal. This is what happens when you have…
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 the land mass! Take a second to let that sink in. The absolutely obvious solution for mass transportation must be…
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 play: inane questions in the pretext of customizing it for me. You know the routine: An elaborate personalization quiz. Or…
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 information. But frameworks can become cages. We obsess over the process until we find ourselves saying, “I understand, but the…
You got to love it when your AI chatbot has a sense of humour. This was me asking Gemini for a gist of Nassim Taleb’s ‘The Black Swan’, when she started the explanation with this quip. I was reminded of the movie Interstellar, where McConaughey’s character reduces the incredible robot TARS’ humour setting, and later…
There’s a particular frame of time I’m sure you have experienced. You have a big presentation later today, or you’re travelling for a week, and suddenly you have a mental clarity that’s often missing from daily routines. When you know you’ll be away, pending tasks become crystal clear. You remember to have someone feed the…
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 design thinkers are empaths, and that trait is always switched on. People get surprised, sometimes even offended, when you don’t…
Ever happened to you? You wrap up a 30-minute (or longer) meeting, get back to your desk ready to dive back into work after the meeting that could, in some ways, be considered a break from work; but something feels off. Words on the screen look familiar, but you’re reading the same paragraph three times…
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 products industry probably asked themselves: “How do we make products and packaging cheaper and more convenient?” Enter plastics. Lightweight, durable,…
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 volume and it takes about 2 seconds for the volume bar to disappear. Before that if you clicked on any…
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 challenge: I released the Kindle eBook and paperbacks on Amazon global sites myself. Subsequently, Notion Press helped me make it…