Compound Interest of Private Notes Strongly recommend everyone to keep private notes about people.
These could even be some random jotted keywords: "served in the navy", "capuccino lover", "biker", "loves going on long walks", and so on. When private notes accumulate over time in the form of a database, they start showing emergent properties....
knowledge The role of taste in building products Take Marc Lou, a familiar figure within the Twitter Indiehacking circle. He's garnered attention for openly sharing his journey as a product builder. This transparency has piqued interest in his projects well before their launch, as followers have grown to appreciate his distinctive approach. A notable instance of this was the excitement around his AI logo generator, which swiftly climbed to the top spot on Product Hunt. Despite its remarkable simplicity, the product captured the audience's attention, largely because the audience already understood the creator's taste.
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design Opportunity Harvesting Intended Audience — For those who are in a transitory phase in their careers, looking for their next big leap of faith. This is a guide to harvest opportunies in a systematic fashion
In the past seven months since I'd shifted to London, I've been on the lookout for harvesting opportunities around me. I deliberately avoid using the term 'job hunt' here, as I sought to broaden my scope beyond traditional roles, exploring opportunities with VCs, startup incubators, part-time gigs, and more. Opportunity harvesting could even mean having genuinely interesting conversations with people you admire online. That was success, too....
careers Exploring "smart connections" for note taking Not starting with a blank slate has been a great productivity boost in my writing. I wrote 50K words in 2024. And I can safely say that these 50K words have been written in a well thought manner, instead of an AI generated word salad.
All this, because I've been exploring this neat little plugin called as [Smart Connections on Obsidian.](https://www.google.com/search?q=smart+connections+obsidian+plugin&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) It is a tool, and I wouldn't be naive enough to say that tools don't matter. This tool allows for two main affordances:...
knowledge Better way to think about conflicts What's the hardest conflict you've ever encountered at your work?
It's hard to avoid conflicts, but there are various ways in which we could mitigate conflict as much as possible. As a product person, apart from keeping the team running, working with stakeholders, shipping successful products, you're also tasked with resolving conflicts. As Feynman once said, '**Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings**'. While dealing with people and emotions, It takes time and effort to identify conflicting situations in advance, and to nip them in the bud if possible. And this requires expertise maneouvring the field space of 'feelings'....
conflict-management How to arrive at on-brand colours? While creating a brand, one of the hardest things to do is to arrive at the right set of colors. Colors are a tricky subject—when done incorrectly, the emotions get mismatched, and in the worst of situations, the brand might just seem all over the place.
Think of the last time you went to a fast food joint. What was the color of the brand? Most probably, it might be a combination of red and yellow. And that’s definitely not a coincidence — research suggests that red or pink occupies 41% of the food industry when it comes to branding....
design Beauty of Zettels I've tried various tools and systems for online writing, but nothing beats the power of Zettels.
What are they, really? You may ask....
knowledge Virtuoso Guide for Personal Memory Systems Forgetting concepts is good for your memory. Forgetting them for a certain duration, and thinking about them again, actually makes the memory more concrete.
This could be best illustrated by the repetition curve graph below:...
memory A Primer to Service Design Blueprints I’ve found this exercise very valuable when it comes to mapping both the frontstage and backstage of any product/service.
It’s a terrible tool to communicate what the product/service looks like. If you squint your eye and look at it, you might see an array of sticky notes and flowcharts lined up. However, it’s the best way to understand the front stage, the backstage, or even the backstage behind that backstage....
design Design is a confusing word As designers, we’re always asked to vouch for the user’s needs above anything else. But if the company takes a hit, all of our efforts might end in vain.
To solve this dilemma, this note from Dan Winer comes in handy—...
design How to spot human writing on the internet? In the classic Turing Test, a computer is considered intelligent if it can convince a human that it’s another human in a conversation. At that time, human-generated content dominated the internet.
But that was a decade ago. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI-generated content now rivals, and in some cases outpaces, human-created material....
writing Digital Products built like physical artisanal tools Tobias Van Schneider in his blog talks about a new way to think about building modern software—
The advancements of our modern world mean there’s generally more of everything. The streaming age has led to a proliferation of low-quality content, churned out to satisfy the binge-watching masses. The ever-scrolling audiences and their short attention spans require news sources to up the ante, publishing throwaway articles (increasingly written by robots) like hotcakes. Industrialization and the off-loading of production to developing countries means clothes are mass-produced, designed to be thrown away and replaced one season to the next. ...
design Directory Structure Visualizer I wanted an easy way in which I could visualise any directory that i'm navigating on the CLI. Yes, you did have standard npm packages such as "tree" for example, but those were not very helpful for me to understand the overall size of the files. I wanted a more "detailed" tree that could help me gauge how the codebase looks like.
For this reason, I created this package — dftree. This generates more visual UX-friendly representations of directory structures using Unicode box-drawing characters....
prototypes Methods are lifejackets not straight jackets Design methods are life jackets. Not straight jackets.
Structures, whether they're processes, frameworks, or plans, are excellent tools to navigate complicated problems. They bring efficiency, reduce ambiguity, and offer defaults. ...
methodology How I ship "stuff" As a disclaimer, I would like to mention that I have a very shabby process of getting things done. There could be a golden standard out there worth emulating; but nevertheless, this (rather easy) system works for me, and I continue to follow this—
1. Most of the work in completing the to-dos lies in preparing my own mindset. I have a standard 9-to-5 job, and this works the best for me to plan things out. The end of the working week acts as a temporal marker in my mind to rest, sprint, and reasses my time and energy....
rough-notes Read writers who operate We have more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds, and books on ornithologists written by birds. Taleb eloquently describes this as the key problem of knowledge, or in other words as _epistemic arrogance_. Strong corollary can be drawn with various disciplines, including entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs simply spend more time doing entrepreneurship rather than writing about entrepreneurship. It's very difficult for successful entrepreneurs who are in the thick of action, to be talking about action....
writing Balancing work, time and focus Have you head of the Eudaimonia machine?
Imagine a one-story, narrow structure, a straightforward rectangle divided into five rooms, in succession. There's no quick escape route here. This design insists that as you move through, you're plunging deeper into the world of intense productivity....
productivity Virtual bookshelves A memory I’ve been longing to create virtually — is this experience of inviting your guests home, and showing them your bookshelf. The guests then come across a book of common interest and we end up sprawling other adjacent topics while I try my best to connect them with the books on my bookshelf.
After moving across a couple of continents, and work locations, the longing for recreating this experience has remained unchanged. ...
prototypes Making Nielsen's heuristics more digestible Jakob Nielsen's heuristics are probably the most-used usability heuristics for the design of interfaces.
If you go to their website, you might encounter these dry prescriptive statements as shown in the image....
design Breaking the fourth wall of an interview ****Intended audience:**** For leaders interviewing candidates for product or other tech leadership roles
A group of men eating ice cream during peak London summer started drowning in large numbers....
interviewing