Visualize the end

I was listening to a talk given by a Product Manager at Amazon on their development process and was impressed by the emphasis on visualizing the end. Although they call it ‘Start with the customer and work backwards’.

Expectations, reality and happiness

One of the most interesting perspectives on life that I’ve come across has been on the relationship between expectations, reality and happiness.

Happiness = Reality / Expectations

Write down your goals

The Baader Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the Frequency bias, is the effect where something that you learn / hear about suddenly starts to appear all around you. For instance, you may hear about a certain car while talking to a friend, and suddenly you start noticing that model of car…

The three types of feedback

Feedback is essential for learning. While building products, we seek feedback from our users to know what they think and where we can improve. As employees, we seek feedback from our mentors and our managers. As students, we seek feedback from our peers and our teachers.

The fastest way to learn

We learn to speak a new language much faster when we are in a foreign land where all the people are only speaking that language and we have no other way (except maybe sign language) to communicate with them, than when we are learning by listening to videos on our own.

A good first time

Yesterday, I’d been on a hike to an abandoned village somewhere outside the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah. With the Sun blocked by the clouds, and a cool gentle breeze throughout, the weather couldn’t have been any better for the hike.

Find people who’ve done it before

The best thing about going to a top university…

The best thing about working at a great company…

The best thing about living in a startup ecosystem like that of Silicon Valley…

Curiosity

Working as a Product Manager involves understanding product and business metrics — how many users are interacting with a feature, how many are making purchases (or completing other actions), etc.

Such metrics determine a lot of decisions that we end up taking — whether to launch a…

Try explaining it

I consume a lot of information — through books, articles, podcasts, among other sources. It is always at the back of my mind as to whether I’m merely consuming something or inculcating it.

A good way to test whether we have actually understood something is to try and…

Transferring what you learn

When we take a course in university (or school), it is structured to give us exposure to different scenarios around a concept, in the hope that we will be able to understand in some contexts and then be able to successfully transfer that to other places.