The Culture-fit Conundrum
The Art of Interviewing the Interviewer
“There are no stupid questions” is a nice sentiment that may be appropriate in some contexts, however, the art of asking questions is an underrated skill, especially when we look for our next career move.
For example, asking “How is the culture at your organization?” to an interviewer is like asking “What kind of a person are you?”. You may not hear intentional lies, but human minds are often incredibly biased against acknowledging vulnerabilities.
If you truly want to understand the culture of an organization, you need to ask questions that focus on the choices, behaviors, and actions during a…
Re-imagining Education
Quality Education is a service design problem.
(This article was “written in public”. After a skeleton draft was posted on LinkedIn and Twitter seeking feedback, the attributed responses below were used to further refine and add to the key takeaways.)
The term “Ed Tech” feels like an oxymoron in India, an attempt to change the cover of a book when the book itself needs a replacement. Most technology-first solutions attempting to revamp education in India are primarily using the scale, speed, and standardization of technology to accelerate the adoption of an outdated educational experience. An enterprise architect himself, Vivek Anand, shared his experience of attempting free trial…
The Unsolicited Fortunes
The word in Pali language for gratitude is kataññutā. The word consists of two parts: kata, which means that which has been done, especially to oneself; and annuta means knowing or recognizing. I am likely missing yet another fifty but doing this exercise revealed the many things that are easy to take for granted.
The Serendipities
- Being born healthy
- A dependable mental and physical faculties
- Never having to sleep empty stomach
- Having never been in any serious accident
- Not having to suffer any critical illness
- Having access and means to a good education
- Having lived in geographies without life-threatening conflicts
The Family
- Growing up…
What do Product Managers really do?
A tactical guide to understanding the craft.
I no longer assume I know what someone actually does when they say they are a Product Manager. This year, I had a chance to have over 40 or so 1:1s with folks from outside of work in different stages of their product management journey. No two roles were the same. I distilled our conversations into one picture in an attempt to put a unifying model to the various flavors of product management discipline out there.
The Approach
A significant amount of work that product managers do oscillates between two key questions:
Are we building the right product?
Are we building the…
Power of being in the present
Can an eye ever see itself? Can a leg ever kick itself? Ever seen a hand that grabs itself, or perhaps, a tooth that takes a bite at itself? If you are “it” then you cannot exist out of what you are.
So tell me how can you be defined by the thoughts alone that ring in your mind? For surely you have at least once or more heard a voice within that observed your own.
When in fits of anger, it appealed to you for calm. When driven by hate, it spoke to you of charm. When in depths…
Crafting Careers
A Story of Building Blocks and Jigsaw Puzzles
An artist creates her work as an aggregate of her creativity applied across many layers of perception for an immersive experience for the audience, no matter if you are reading a poem, enjoying a book, or staring at a painting. In that sense, engineers may not be too different.
What does an engineer do?
To deliver a well-defined objective, an engineer:
- architects the layers of abstractions required to achieve the outcome
- devises a system of interactions across these layers to interconnect them
- and finally, reuses or creates patterns of code at each layer to fulfill each of its purpose on the way to orchestrating the…
Building a sustainable career in consulting
The popular character forged by movies and TV series for a successful consultant often involves a pompous extrovert, mostly male, sweeping the clients off their feet with his pretentious know-it-all jargon. In reality, successful women and men leaders in consulting from whom I have learned the most have been introverts. They are great at direct concise communication when needed and always effortlessly step out of the celebratory limelight to let their clients and their teams shine in the success.
Aldous Huxley, an English writer and philosopher, once said, “All science is the reduction of multiplicities to unities”.If I were to…
Planning career transitions to become a product manager.
Lately, I have been getting a few queries from recent graduates on how to seek a job for a Product Manager (PM) role. My 2 cents: don’t. Trying to be a PM straight out of school is like attempting a competitive sport because you have read the rules and watched it unfold from the stadium seats. In that state, neither do we have enough muscle memory built in our minds to do most things right nor enough battle scars to be remotely successful.
That begs another question. With so many flavors of the PM role out there in the market…
The Signs of A Truly Authentic Leader
When Mike Tyson was asked by a reporter whether he was worried about Evander Holyfield and his fight plan he answered, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Most work communities establish values to guide the culture in their organizations. It is relatively easy to define a set of values to be hung as posters on office walls or to be printed on coffee mugs. It is harder to sustain those ideals through tough sales targets and challenging project deadlines. …
Breaking away from mediocre business performances.
We all appreciate what it takes for someone to run a marathon, even if not many of us have attempted it. At some point in our lives, we all have given a shot for a quick sprint or a long jog and know how hard it is to sustain it for 26.2 miles. However, it is often difficult for most of us to appreciate an equivalent amount of effort that goes into an outcome built upon a career practicing the craft of good design.
Popular interest in design often halts at the superficial aspects of aesthetics, whether one is marveling…
