How I do product roasts Product roasts are the best way to enhance one's sensibility around building better products. It's called a "roast" because it often involves a no-holds-barred, brutally honest critique of the product's features, design, user experience, and overall value proposition.
In the spirit of 'everything is a remix', I've liberally forked, remixed and adapted a set of questions from industry leaders like [Manas Saloi](https://manassaloi.com/) and [Julie Zhou](https://www.juliezhuo.com/), to create my own tailored questionnaire for a product roast....
product-management 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 Self Marketing **_I decided to revive a long-lost interest and try my hand at cartooning. But it was an unlikely dream, given my complete lack of artistic talent and the rarity of success stories in that business. So I decided to try something called affirmations, which I will describe in more detail later in the book. I bought some art supplies, practiced drawing every morning before work, and wrote my affirmation fifteen times a day: "I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist."_**
Marketing in other words is using the technology of 'language' in devious ways. Towards manipulation and subterfuge. At least that's how I understood it....
rough-notes 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 Questions to ask every decade This is a list inspired by [Kepano in his blog:](https://stephanango.com/40-questions)
1. What would you do if you had [6 months to live?](app://obsidian.md/HARVARD%20mens-health-50-and-forward.pdf#page=3&selection=27,0,30,39)...
rough-notes 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 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 Public gardens, secret routes When you land on a site, you are treated with various hyperlinks. Based on the UX choices you make, you might end up preferring one over the other. You might get the job done, and head back to your earlier Chrome tab. Nothing out of the ordinary. It's an internet search as usual.
But what about those pages which have no visible links on the site you just searched. It’s hidden in plain sight, but still useful in certain contexts. ...
digital-garden 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 Use code only if no code fails > UPDATE: **The landscape right now looks so different with the recent evolution of "vibe coding". I don't touch no-code tools such as Bubble, Softr etc for any of my prototyping needs for eg. I just shoot directly from the hip. For reference, read my essay on this topic** — [[Vibe coding]], [[Idea in the shower, testing before breakfast]].
Use code only if no code fails. It is that simple. I can assume that there might be counters, attacks and pushpacks to this heavy statement. Bear with me on this. Before we address the house on fire, let me take you on a quick detour....
code 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 How I blog with Obsidian, Cloudflare, AstroJS, Github I’ve been refining my writing and publishing workflow to the point where it feels effortless. It combines Obsidian for writing, AstroJS for building the site, and Cloudflare Pages for deployment.
Everything now lives locally, in plain text, structured neatly for both creative flow and technical control. And this is partly inspired by Kepano's adherence to the local, plain-text format:...
writing 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 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 The meeting before the meeting If you think most product managers spend time in meetings, you're mistaken. The larger chunk of a PM's time is spent in _preparation_ for those meetings - having the "meetings before the meeting", "the meeting", and the "meetings after the meeting."
...
product-management The Modern Startup Stack Choosing a web framework is like choosing your first pokémon.
I didn't want to succumb to the 'new hotness' problem with the myriad of JS frameworks to choose from (Angular, Vue, React, Solid). I wanted something that i can choose and stick to for atleast a decade. So I resorted to a Rails monolith for building apps (but with a slight twist)...
software 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 Conceptual Compression for LLMs Imagine you're building a house. You could break down the act of building into various steps: first comes the foundation, then the framing, then the roofing, and the plumbing, and the wiring, and so on.
Or you could try to do it all at once, ordering a jumble of materials and hoping they somehow come together into a structure. When I instructed Claude/Cursor to build an app, I did something similar by jumbling it up. I dumped a vague request into the LLMs and hoped for the best. "Build me an app that does X."...
software 
