Product Management

My attempt towards discovering epistemology, as a philosophy discipline initially started with a benign question — How do I know with certainty what I believe is true? In this attempt, I had to meander around various schools of thought that discussed this topic in depth — from dogmatism, skepticism, empiricism, relativism and finally, critical rationalism. I wanted to know the truth about truth,...

I got this opportunity to attend ProductCon at London this year. Here are some notes from "the bleeding edge of product management" as described by the panelists and experts. Here are some personal notes from this event: - We're in the AI goldrush era, and the best way to look at this might be too go broad, instead of going narrow. This goes against the grain, and is counterintuitive with all the...

Showing proof-of-work as a designer is quite simple. You made an app, you communicated the output product and exhibit how the product evolved over time ranging from the paper napkin sketch, low fidelity, high fidelity prototypes and finally a fully fledged product. The iterations need not just be tangible, but can be verbal too. Similarly, for an engineer the proof of work is also quite solid....

In the book Inspired, Marty Cagan talks about dividing one's day-to-day tasks into three major buckets: people, process and product. I'd experimented with categorising my tasks into similar such buckets based on the framework by Shreyas Doshi: To make this possible within my workflow, I started colour-coding my calendar for weekly time-management. High leverage tasks are indicated with red color...

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? The journey of prioritisation begins way before the actual process of prioritisation starts. I would start by asking these key questions to the product leadership team—What does the future state look like? — Vision. What are we trying to achieve? —...

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...

I recently transitioned from leading a product team in a region to a more centralised role overseeing products across multiple geographies. As part of that transition, I needed to onboard the new product lead of that region, ensuring they were fully briefed While a virtual onboarding could have covered the basic documents and data points, I knew an in-person handoff was crucial. Slide decks can...

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." Image courtesy: Marketoonist.com In fact, for most one-way door decisions (decisions that are big and hard to reverse), the pre-meeting phase is quite...

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. As there was a huge number of men eating ice cream who drowned, it was concluded that eating ice cream led to drowning 🤷🏼‍♀️ This did sound absurd to the researchers investigating this curious case of the...

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. However, when dealing with fundamentally complex problems, applying structure too early can lock in outdated notions. Because structures tend to ossify. As more team...