Obsessing over personal websites Intended Audience—For those of us who have attempted to make a personal website of their own and have guilt-tripped over making multiple updates every year
I’ve been obsessed with my personal website. It’s not even about the views and impressions which I’m receiving. I have one subscriber on my mailing list from my website, and compared to internet writer standards, I am virtually non existent. ...
software Minto principle for writing memos Initially popularised by McKinsey consultants to draft internal reports, this became quite widespread as a global standard for business writing.
Start with the main statement, draw some conclusions and provide some data/facts and figures for further understanding....
writing Design Manifesto This thought was inspired by the book _Design Expertise_ (Lawson & Dorst, 2009) which includes an interview with the architect Ken Yeang where the author mentions: “I give every new member of staff the practice manual to read when they join. They can not just see past designs but study the principles upon which they’re based”.
In other words, what would be the ethos behind your own unique design practice? When every designer is different in their own way, what would be one’s own **philosophy of practice**?...
design 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 I was wrong about optimal stopping If you were tasked with a need to find the tallest mountain, and went searching in a far away land surrounded by a series of mountains, how would you finalise the tallest mountain, especially when you could still go farther, and find even more taller mountains (only if you explore even more).
There are various ways to term this, some call it the travelling salesman problem, or the "secretary problem", or just as the "optimal stopping" problem, which attempts to come to a mathematical decision on when to actually stop in such explore versus exploit situations. ...
mathematics Do's and Don'ts of User Research Some principles which I follow while doing user-centered design:
1. Involving users early in the product development process makes products intuitive and fosters loyalty. It is essential to zoom out and follow a constant process of hypothesis testing, MVP development, review, and refinement. Preparation of research requires a clear goal and involvement of the research team....
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 Everything is a prioritisation problem When it comes to building a product, everything is a prioritisation problem.
> We might be building things right, but are we building the right thing?...
product-management ProductCon 2025 washup Here are some notes from attending ProductCon 2025, "the bleeding edge of product management" as described by the panelists and experts. There were some interesting ideas, and here are some raw bullet points, in no particular order:
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product-management Idea in the shower, testing before breakfast Imagine having an idea in the shower and testing it before breakfast? It's highly plausible now as AI lets you **prototype at the speed of thought**.
Currently, I use Claude Projects and Cursor to build what I call **disposable apps** - quick prototypes that prove a point (read more in [this essay about vibe coding]([[Vibe coding]])). The magic? No sunk costs. I can write 5,000 lines of code in ten minutes, test it, and throw it away if it doesn't work. This freedom to experiment has transformed how I solve problems....
software 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 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 Complex project management for product In complex companies, with non-obvious interdependencies and hard schedule constraints, organizing the process is a huge "full-time" job, and can save weeks of delays if done right. It signifies the role of a project manager, despite the teams having a product manager in their fold.
As [Ben Kuhn](https://www.benkuhn.net/) puts it, when done right, it can save weeks of delays and nip problems in their bud even before they materialise in the first place....
products 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 Insights are not just a salad of facts What is an insight?
An insight for Elon was: "The most entertaining outcome was the most likely'. His tweet suggests that he believes in taking risks and embracing the unknown, rather than playing it safe....
design Deploying Home Cooked Apps with Rails As a Rails enthusiast, I've always wanted a better deployment solution to house my hobby projects. It was not that there was no good solution available: We have AWS, Heroku, Hatchbox, Fly, Render.io and various other such PaaS alternatives.
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software Brew your ideas lazily Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa achieved through the painstaking application of countless gossamer-thin layers of oil paint over the course of many years, many months. The _sfumato_ technique which Da Vinci popularised, involved applying more than 40 layers of paint, each only 10 to 50 micrometers thick, using fingers to blend the colors and create the depth of illusion. The creation process was "perpetually unfinished" — He began the portrait around 1503, but didn't complete it till his death in 1519. And it would be foolish to dismiss him as a 'master procrastinator' — _What if the attribute of delayed procrastination in itself had some merit?_ I'm beginning to suspect that this was the hidden reason behind the genius of Mona Lisa. The art of brewing ideas lazily.
In 2009, a review of three dozen studies conducted by researchers of Lancaster University concluded that setting aside a problem was helpful in improving the performance of divergent thinking tasks....
ideas Understanding codebases without using code Analysing codebase and understanding the patterns followed at a top level has become surprisingly easier nowadays with the help of tools such as Gemini (for larger context windows), Gitingest (to convert codebases to simpler markdown), and Mermaid.js (for visualising mermaid diagrams).
This is how I would approach understanding a fresh new codebase in order to take a cursory look:...
rough-notes