Jan 2025

2025 is the year of AI. I'm aligning my professional goals to get ahead on this S-curve.

My thesis for product management is that it would become more of prototype management. There would be a lot more experimentation, quick validations that the product roles would handle, much more than what we do today. Product management and Product building would probaby fuse into this new (undefined) role. We can call this as "AI Product Management" for now, but I suspect that this would be something else entirely different.

Most PMs don't see how rapidly their role is changing. Writing specs becomes building MVPs. Managing timelines becomes rapid iteration. As AI handles the coordination, what matters is talking to customers and learning to sell. The best prototype is worthless if you build without understanding or can't convince others of its value.

2025, I will be experimenting with both AI for product management, as well as AI for product development.

Writing software, especially prototypes, is becoming cheaper. This will lead to increased demand for people who can decide what to build.

AI Product Management has a bright future! Software is often written by teams that comprise Product Managers (PMs), who decide what to build (such as what features to implement for what users) and Software Developers, who write the code to build the product. 

Economics shows that when two goods are complements — such as cars (with internal-combustion engines) and gasoline — falling prices in one leads to higher demand for the other. For example, as cars became cheaper, more people bought them, which led to increased demand for gas. 

Something similar will happen in software. Given a clear specification for what to build, AI is making the building itself much faster and cheaper. This will significantly increase demand for people who can come up with clear specs for valuable things to build. 

 This is why I’m excited about the future of Product Management, the discipline of developing and managing software products. I’m especially excited about the future of AI Product Management, the discipline of developing and managing AI software products. 

 Many companies have an Engineer:PM ratio of, say, 6:1. (The ratio varies widely by company and industry, and anywhere from 4:1 to 10:1 is typical.) As coding becomes more efficient, teams will need more product management work (as well as design work) as a fraction of the total workforce. 

Perhaps engineers will step in to do some of this work, but if it remains the purview of specialized Product Managers, then the demand for these roles will grow. This change in the composition of software development teams is not yet moving forward at full speed. One major force slowing this shift, particularly in AI Product Management, is that Software Engineers, being technical, are understanding and embracing AI much faster than Product Managers. 

Even today, most companies have difficulty finding people who know how to develop products and also understand AI, and I expect this shortage to grow. Further, AI Product Management requires a different set of skills than traditional software Product Management. 

It requires:

Technical proficiency in AI: PMs need to understand what products might be technically feasible to build. They also need to understand the lifecycle of AI projects, such as data collection, building, then monitoring, and maintenance of AI models.

Iterative development: Because AI development is much more iterative than traditional software and requires more course corrections along the way, PMs need be able to manage such a process. 

Data proficiency: AI products often learn from data, and they can be designed to generate richer forms of data than traditional software. 

Skill in managing ambiguity: Because AI’s performance is hard to predict in advance, PMs need to be comfortable with this and have tactics to manage it. 

Ongoing learning: AI technology is advancing rapidly. PMs, like everyone else who aims to make best use of the technology, need to keep up with the latest technology advances, product ideas, and how they fit into users’ lives. 

Finally, AI Product Managers will need to know how to ensure that AI is implemented responsibly (for example, when we need to implement guardrails to prevent bad outcomes), and also be skilled at gathering feedback fast to keep projects moving. 

Increasingly, I also expect strong product managers to be able to build prototypes for themselves. The demand for good AI Product Managers will be huge. In addition to growing AI Product Management as a discipline, perhaps some engineers will also end up doing more product management work. The variety of valuable things we can build is nearly unlimited. What a great time to build!

In this earlier essay, I'd written about all the various tools I'm currently experimenting with. (Read — Idea in the shower, testing before breakfast)

I've also observed myself follow this (very strange) law of inverse prioritisation — What I know to be the most important, I do the least of it.

The perils of breaking these goals are so much seeped into my subconscious that I'd rather just avoid it. I think it might have a lot to do with how vulnerable I feel when I break something which I consider to be "my most important goal". So in order to break free from this pattern, I'm announcing my learning goals in a 'semi-public' fashion here on this site. This is how my current 2025 learning list looks like—

  1. Founder / Hacker: Great foundations on how to build SaaS apps using Ruby on Rails. Covers all the major use cases which one frequently encounters while building a modern software such as authentications, database modelling, applying business logic, frontend designing, wireframing, security, infra etc.
  2. Cursor / Claude : To become better at the very bleeding edge of technology with regards to the use of AI-native tools for local development, I plan to allocate a 50$ budget every month to use both Cursor/Claude in as many use cases as I can. I'm discovering new use cases every day, and I continue to do so.

If you could build a neutron-produced nuclear fusor in your kitchen with Claude in a 36-hour livestream, then I seriously believe anything is possible

Oct 2024

I’ll miss you dad. I’m not able to get over this shock. Even today, I tried calling you on your phone, even though I knew deep down that you wouldn’t pick it up. I’ll miss the fact that I will not be able to call you again and share my heart out.

Losing you has been the single most point of concentrated pain that I could recall. Perhaps this pain is a vestige from the love I’ve received from you.

I’m supposed to ‘man up’, cope with this pain and grief and not cry as much. After a few days of barricading my emotions, and to act strong in front of others, I let myself cry my heart out. Crying has been my emotional release valve and I’ve had enough of this pretense of ‘manning up’. I’m annoyed by the fact that you are now not around. 

As I see myself circling around the five stages of grief, I’ve started to accept the situation (slowly). You’ll continue to live with us in our memories, dad. They are as ‘real’ as it can be, and you’re very much alive this way. Like you always used to say, I’ll continue to see ‘education as an investment’. 

I’ll continue to make you proud, dad. We’re still one, just you and me, one mind, one soul, one being.

July, 2024

On July 19th, everything, everywhere, went haywire, all at once.

Two weeks prior to this day, the student protests in Bangladesh had just started. The controversial quota system for government jobs reserved 30% positions for descendants of those who fought in the 1971 Liberation war, 10% for women, and 10% for residents of specific districts. These sparked a huge round of debates around meritocracy in the country, and it was at this junction that I landed in Dhaka.

I had come here as a part of my work at Noora Health. We were gearing ourselves towards a launch of a national health program centered around patients with hypertension, stroke and diabetes.

After arriving in Dhaka, I was situated close to our office at Bonani, and wasn't really moving around much. In my first week, I didn't really feel the effect of the protests happening around me in my vicinity. It was only in the second week that I started 'feeling' the reverberations of these student protests in and around Bonani. I wanted to order food from Foodpanda, but the restaurants were all closed. Even private caterers were not serving food then. When I tried having a meal at a neighbouring restaurant to the hotel, my card stopped working. I thought it was some glitch with the payment processor. Realised later that a nationwide shutdown had just started. There was no internet.

I was advised to stay indoors for the time being. I still had my flight back to India, and was thinking of a way in which I could reach the airport. The roads were all blocked, especially the ones to the airport.

For my flight at 9 PM that night, I got a cab to drop me at 4 AM in the morning. As the protests usually started earlier in the morning, I had to leave earlier than the earlier morning to avoid any road blockades and reach the airport safely.

Once I reached the airport, I just raw-dogged the whole day. It was then that I observed a lot of flights getting cancelled left and right. One by one. I was counting sticks every time a flight was terminated, and my total count for that day in the airport was around 10. I still had my Air India flight later that night, and I was still optimistic about the flight not being delayed (After all, it was the same Air India flight that had rescued Indians from Ukraine during the recent crisis)

Why were the flights getting cancelled though? My first instinct would have been to 'Google' why this was so. But I didn't have internet. Not having internet was a relatively new phenomenon that I was experiencing.

And as you might have expected, my flight had also got cancelled that day.

In hindsight, this was the same day when the entire world witnessed one of the biggest IT disruptions in recent years due to the Crowdstrike error. Corporations worldwide reported outages and disruptions, with Windows computers displaying the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. The outage had impacted sectors such as banking, trading, media companies as well as hundreds of airliners (which included my cancelled Air India flight)

While all this was happening around me, the airliners responded with— 'All flights are getting cancelled, (perhaps), the only way to make it to India is to travel by road and cross the Bangladesh-India border...'.

I got a second opinion from my work colleagues on what I could do next. Apparently, the violence and protests had also reached the airport vicinity and it was not advised to step out of the airport. So, I just sat down and waited. Thinking of what I could do next.

After a period of confusion and chaos, and in my second day at the Dhaka airport, I secured an alternate flight to Chennai, and landed home the day after that.

I somehow reached home safely, and I sincerely pray for the safety of my friends and colleagues in Bangladesh during this period of emergency. Hope normalcy is restored soon.

UPDATE (5th August)—Ms Hasina resigns as prime minister after weeks of student-led protests - which left hundreds dead - escalated and culminated in calls for her to stand down.

UPDATE (8th August)—Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been sworn in as Bangladesh's interim leader, vowing to "uphold, support and protect the constitution".