Posts on Arjun Uvacha

Cognitive Biases - Part 08: Hyperbolic Discounting

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 17:30:42 +0530

👋🏼 Hey there! Thank you for stopping by.

😀 Please note that this is the eighth in a series of articles I am writing on Cognitive Biases. If you haven’t read the other seven yet, I’d recommend you read them first. Links below:

Let’s start with a quick scenario. It’s January 1st, and you’re feeling invincible. You’ve just signed up for a year-long gym membership, convinced that this is the year you’ll finally get in shape. The first week is fantastic—you hit the gym every day, share your progress with friends, and feel unstoppable. Fast forward to February. Work gets busier, motivation dips, and soon enough, your gym bag gathers dust. By March, you’re left regretting the expensive membership, wondering what went wrong. 🤔

Sounds familiar?

This isn’t just about fitness. It’s about the way we tend to overestimate short-term wins while underestimating the patience, consistency, and discipline required for long-term success.

Take another example—a credit card with an irresistible 0% interest offer. You think, “This is easy! I’ll pay it off before the period ends.” But months later, life happens, you miss the deadline, and suddenly, you’re hit with high-interest debt you didn’t see coming.

So, why do we keep falling into this trap?

The answer lies in hyperbolic discounting, a cognitive bias that tricks our brains into valuing immediate rewards far more than future benefits. Let’s dig into why this happens and how to escape the cycle.

Hyperbolic Discounting: The Brain’s Short-Term Bias

Hyperbolic discounting is our tendency to prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones. It’s why we procrastinate, struggle with long-term goals, and make impulsive decisions. Our brain naturally prioritizes NOW over LATER, even when later is objectively better.

Why Do We Fall for It?

Here are the top 5 reasons why I think this happens.

🧠 1. Evolutionary Instincts

Back in the day, our ancestors had to prioritize immediate survival. If they found food, they ate it immediately—because who knew when the next meal would come? Planning for the distant future wasn’t valuable in an unpredictable world. Fast forward to today, and our brains still hold on to this wiring, making it hard to resist instant gratification.

🔮 2. Uncertainty of the Future

One of the biggest reasons people overestimate short-term wins is the uncertainty of the future. When faced with a choice between immediate rewards and long-term benefits, we instinctively favor the present because the future feels unpredictable and beyond our control.

For example, consider a tech startup with limited funding. The founders have two choices:

Invest in long-term product development—building a robust platform, focusing on retention, and gradually acquiring loyal users.
Push for rapid user growth through heavy discounts, aggressive marketing, and short-term promotions, hoping that high numbers will attract investors.

Most likely, many startups choose the second option because future success is uncertain. They think, “Who knows if we’ll survive long enough to see long-term results? Let’s show impressive numbers now.” However, once the discounts stop, most of these users churn, leaving the startup with unsustainable growth and financial strain.

This decision-making pattern isn’t just seen in businesses. Individuals do it all the time. Many people avoid investing for retirement because the benefits feel distant and uncertain. Instead, they spend impulsively on things that bring immediate pleasure, assuming they will “figure it out” later.

😍 3. Emotional Impulsivity

Immediate rewards trigger dopamine, the brain’s pleasure chemical. That’s why eating a donut feels better than saying no in favor of long-term health. Delayed gratification takes discipline, and let’s be honest—it’s hard!

🎯 4. Short-Term Motivation Loops

Short-term wins give us quick validation. Posting about a gym session on Instagram brings instant likes, while real results—like losing weight or building muscle—take months. This immediate feedback keeps us hooked.

🤯 5. Cognitive Overload

When life gets overwhelming, our brain defaults to the easiest, most rewarding option. Long-term goals require sustained effort, patience, and strategic planning—things that feel mentally exhausting when juggling daily stressors. The harder a decision appears, the more tempting it becomes to choose short-term relief, even if it leads to long-term setbacks. This is why consistency often feels so difficult.

Undersood why we fall for it. But what do we gain?

⚡ 1. Instant Gratification Bias

We crave rewards now rather than waiting for bigger payoffs later. Whether it’s junk food over meal prep, or binge-watching instead of studying, our brains prioritize immediate pleasure over patience.

📊 2. Short-Term Metrics Drive Motivation

Immediate feedback feels more rewarding than waiting for long-term progress. That’s why businesses focus on quarterly earnings rather than sustainable growth, and why students cram instead of adopting better study habits.

Seeing others celebrate quick wins influences our perception of success. When startups flaunt rapid user growth but ignore retention, or influencers share overnight success stories, we assume short-term wins are more valuable than they actually are.

🌀 4. The “Present Bias” Illusion

We assume our future self will be more disciplined, focused, and capable of handling challenges. “I’ll start saving next year” or “Future me will be more responsible” are classic examples of how we trick ourselves into postponing key decisions.

🚧 5. Underestimating Long-Term Effort

We often miscalculate how much time, effort, and consistency are required for real success. Many expect to see drastic results after just a few weeks of dieting, but true health transformations take months or years.

When does this become a problem?

Short-term wins aren’t inherently bad, but when they take priority over long-term strategy, they can be destructive:

❌ Poor Financial Decisions – People often prioritize immediate spending on luxuries or impulsive purchases rather than long-term financial health. This leads to accumulating debt, missed investment opportunities, and financial stress in the future.

❌ Unrealistic Business Strategies – Companies chasing quick profits frequently compromise sustainable growth by neglecting innovation, customer retention, or long-term value creation, ultimately leading to instability.

❌ Burnout & Frustration – Expecting instant success in careers or personal goals often results in disappointment. When results take longer than expected, frustration sets in, leading many to give up too soon.

❌ Shallow Skill Development – Constantly jumping between different pursuits for quick wins prevents deep expertise. Mastery requires sustained effort, but chasing rapid results results in limited proficiency and weaker long-term outcomes.

Got it. How can I work on it?

Breaking free from the cycle of hyperbolic discounting takes effort, but it’s absolutely possible! Let’s see how.

🌍 1. Adopt a Long-Term Mindset (The “10-Year Rule”)

Before making a decision, ask yourself: Will this choice still benefit me in 10 years? If the answer is no, reconsider. This rule helps filter out impulsive decisions and encourages choices that align with long-term success. Many decisions that seem urgent today will feel irrelevant a decade from now. Prioritizing future stability over momentary pleasure prevents regret and fosters consistent growth.

🔄 2. Create Systems Instead of Just Goals

Rather than focusing on one-time goals like “lose 10kg,” shift your focus to building habits—such as consistently exercising, eating well, and tracking progress. Goals are great for setting direction, but systems ensure long-term sustainability. A well-designed system keeps you moving forward even when motivation fades, making success more predictable and manageable over time.

⏳ 3. Use the “24-Hour Rule” for Big Decisions

If you’re about to make a major decision—whether it’s making a large purchase, quitting a job, or responding to an emotional situation—wait 24 hours before acting. This cooling-off period allows you to assess whether your decision is driven by impulse or logic. Often, after a day, what felt urgent no longer seems as appealing, helping you avoid costly mistakes.

📈 4. Validate Short-Term Gains With Long-Term Data

Short-term success can be misleading if it’s not backed by real, long-term impact. In business, product development, and personal growth, rely on data-driven insights rather than momentary spikes. Track trends over time to differentiate sustainable growth from temporary surges. By making decisions based on consistent patterns rather than short-term excitement, you avoid chasing misleading wins that don’t contribute to lasting success.

🏆 5. Celebrate Long-Term Wins

Instead of only acknowledging short-term achievements, shift your focus to recognizing sustainable progress. Whether in personal goals, career growth, or business milestones, long-term success often goes unnoticed because it lacks immediate excitement. However, celebrating consistent effort and meaningful progress fosters resilience and encourages sustained commitment. Leaders should create an environment where perseverance and strategic growth are valued over quick wins.

Conclusion: Think long!

Short-term wins feel great, but they rarely lead to meaningful success on their own. Understanding why we overestimate them and how hyperbolic discounting tricks our brain can help us make better choices.

Whether it’s fitness, finances, career goals, or business decisions, learning to balance short-term motivation with long-term vision is the key to sustained success.

Next time you’re about to make a decision, pause and ask: Am I choosing short-term excitement over long-term value?

Making that small shift in thinking can unlock greater success, stability, and fulfillment in the long run.

💬 What’s one short-term decision you regret? Share your thoughts below! 😊

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

AI: The product intern we all wanted

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 13:00:23 +0530

👋🏼 Hello! Thank you for stopping by.

😀 If you’re a product manager or an AI enthusiast, this article is for you. In this article, I have explored how AI is transforming the world of product management and how we, as leaders, can embrace this change to create a lasting impact.

Before we dive in, take a moment to reflect: Have you ever made a decision that felt more instinctual than data-driven? Or spent hours poring over routine tasks that seemed to pull you away from strategy and innovation? If so, you’re not alone. And here’s the good news — AI is here to help.

Let’s walk through how AI is reshaping three critical aspects of product management: decision-making, automating routine tasks, and creating deeply personalized customer experiences. Along the way, I’ll share a few stories and lessons to make it relatable. I hope they resonate with you as much as they do with me.

🚀 The Shift in Decision-Making with AI

When I think of decision-making, I’m reminded of my early days as a product manager. Back then, decisions often relied on gut feeling, past experiences, and scattered data. But today, AI is changing the game.

🧠 Data-Driven Decision Superpowers

AI allows product managers to process massive amounts of data, uncovering patterns and insights that were once unimaginable. Imagine having a tool that not only identifies trends but also predicts what’s coming next. That’s what AI brings to the table.

Take, for instance, an Indian e-commerce platform targeting diverse customers across regions. With AI-powered analytics, the platform can identify that sarees are trending in Tamil Nadu while contemporary fashion is booming in Mumbai. Armed with these insights, PMs can align inventory and marketing strategies to meet regional demands.

Reflecting on this, I’m reminded of Marty Cagan’s words: “The best product managers don’t just react to data; they use it to anticipate what’s next.” With AI, we can do just that.

🕒 Real-Time Insights for Agile Management

AI tools provide real-time dashboards and predictive analytics, enabling us to monitor metrics and pivot quickly when needed. Picture a fintech PM in India receiving an AI-generated alert about a sudden drop in user engagement. Instead of waiting for a quarterly review, the PM can investigate immediately, ensuring swift action to address the issue.

These real-time insights remind us that being proactive is key to staying ahead in a fast-paced market.

🤖 Automating Routine Tasks to Elevate Strategy

Let’s face it, we’ve all been there — stuck in the endless loop of managing backlogs, compiling user feedback, and updating roadmaps. While these tasks are important, they often leave little room for strategic thinking. That’s where AI steps in to save the day.

🔍 Streamlining Market Research

Market research, which used to take weeks, can now be done in minutes. AI tools equipped with Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyze reviews, social media chatter, and survey responses to extract actionable insights.

This reminds me of a conversation with a PM friend working in consumer tech. He shared how an AI tool helped him uncover user pain points by analyzing thousands of online reviews. What would have taken weeks was done in a single afternoon — leaving him free to focus on designing solutions.

💬 Simplifying Feedback Collection

Feedback collection is another area where AI shines. Imagine deploying a chatbot on your app to gather user feedback 24/7. The bot not only collects responses but also analyzes sentiment, categorizing feedback into themes. This eliminates the need for manual sorting and ensures no valuable insight is missed.

📅 Enhancing Roadmap Management

With AI-enabled project management platforms, updating roadmaps and identifying dependencies becomes a breeze. I recall how a colleague once marveled at how his AI tool suggested optimal timelines for a multi-team project. The time saved allowed him to focus on building a compelling product vision.

🌟 The Power of Personalization Through AI

If there’s one thing we all crave as customers, it’s personalization. AI takes this to a whole new level, enabling PMs to create deeply tailored experiences that resonate with users.

🎯 Advanced Customer Segmentation

AI dives deep into user data, segmenting customers into highly specific cohorts. Unlike manual segmentation that relies on assumptions or broad categories, AI builds clusters based on behavior, preferences, geography, and more. Picture an OTT platform analyzing viewing patterns across India. It notices that a family in Delhi prefers Bollywood classics and kids’ cartoons, while a tech-savvy college student in Bangalore binges trending regional dramas. With these insights, the platform doesn’t just push generic recommendations — it curates a viewing experience tailored for each user, boosting satisfaction and engagement.

But segmentation doesn’t stop at content. AI also helps businesses refine marketing strategies. For example, targeted promotions for seasonal products or region-specific offers can lead to higher conversion rates. This ability to micro-target ensures no opportunity is left untapped.

🔮 Anticipating Customer Needs

AI doesn’t just respond to customer behavior — it predicts it. Think of a ride-hailing app that uses AI to forecast demand spikes during festivals or rainy seasons. By analyzing historical data and real-time inputs like weather conditions, the app adjusts its driver allocation and pricing proactively. Customers experience shorter wait times, and drivers benefit from increased demand, creating a win-win scenario.

Or imagine an online grocery store predicting when a customer might run out of essentials like milk or bread, based on their purchasing habits. The store can then send timely reminders or offer subscriptions, ensuring the customer never runs out. These proactive measures not only delight users but also build trust and loyalty over time.

🔑 Key Skills for Product Managers in the AI Era

As AI continues to transform the role of product management, it’s clear that product managers need to evolve alongside it. While AI automates and simplifies many tasks, it also introduces new challenges and opportunities. Embracing this change requires a shift in mindset and a willingness to learn. Let’s discuss the skills that PMs need to stay ahead in this AI-powered world.

The role of a PM is no longer limited to traditional responsibilities like roadmap planning or stakeholder management. Today, PMs must act as the bridge between cutting-edge AI capabilities and real-world user needs. They must learn how to work with AI, use it effectively, and ensure it aligns with the overall product vision. Here are a few skills that I believe are crucial:

📊 Embrace Data Literacy

Data literacy is the foundation of thriving in an AI-driven environment. PMs don’t need to be data scientists, but they must be comfortable interpreting AI outputs and working with data teams. Understanding data structures, metrics, and AI algorithms allows PMs to ask the right questions and make informed decisions.

❤️ Cultivate Empathy

While AI excels at analyzing data, it’s up to PMs to ensure decisions remain human-centric. Empathy helps PMs understand the deeper motivations and emotions of users, bridging the gap between data-driven insights and real-world impact. After all, no algorithm can fully replace the intuition and emotional intelligence of a human PM.

🎯 Focus on Strategy

AI frees up time, but that time must be spent wisely. Strategic thinking becomes even more critical when AI takes care of routine tasks. PMs must define bold product visions, prioritize high-impact initiatives, and ensure that AI capabilities are aligned with long-term goals.

🤝 Collaborate with AI

Think of AI as the ultimate product intern: reliable, efficient, and capable of handling tedious tasks. But just like any intern, AI needs guidance and oversight. PMs should experiment with AI tools, integrate them into workflows, and treat them as collaborative partners rather than replacements.

🔄 Adaptability and Curiosity

The AI landscape evolves rapidly, and PMs must stay curious to keep up. Continuous learning—whether through workshops, online courses, or collaboration with AI teams—ensures that PMs remain equipped to navigate this dynamic environment.

💡 Conclusion: A New Era for Product Management

AI is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s a present reality. By enhancing decision-making, automating tasks, and enabling personalization, it empowers product managers to create extraordinary outcomes.

For Indian businesses, the potential of AI is immense. With our diverse markets and evolving customer expectations, embracing AI isn’t just an advantage — it’s a necessity. As Marty Cagan says, “The best PMs harness AI not to replace their role, but to elevate it.”

So, here’s my question to you: How will you leverage AI to transform your product and create a lasting impact? I’d love to hear your thoughts! 😊

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

💬 Also, please share your comment or feedback.

The Art of Saying No - a PM Superpower

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 19:12:43 +0530

👋🏼 Hello! Thank you for stopping by.

😀 If you’re a product manager, you’ve likely been in situations where you’ve had to make tough calls—balancing stakeholder demands, team capacity, and user needs. Let’s face it, saying no is hard, especially when you’re dealing with passionate team members and ambitious business goals. But here’s the thing: Saying no is not a limitation. It’s a superpower.

Let me take you through my journey as a product manager and share why learning to say no has been one of the most impactful skills I’ve developed.

Why Saying No Matters

1. Ensuring Customer-Centricity

As product managers, we must remember: It’s all about the users. Not every request aligns with what customers truly need, and saying no ensures we prioritize solving meaningful problems.

For example, while working at Phable Care, I had to say no to both the engineering lead and sales head who wanted incremental updates to our existing doctor platform. Instead, I pushed for building a queue management system that would address critical pain points for clinic users.

To get buy-in, I focused on three things:

User Pain Points: I explained the challenges clinic users faced, like inefficiencies in managing patients with the existing system.
User Anecdotes: I shared direct feedback from users, like one who said, “With the calendar solution, I have to go to three different places to manage a patient, but with the queue solution, all three actions could be done in a single place.”
Data Analysis: I quantified the pain points and showed how addressing them could significantly boost retention.

When we launched the new system, retention rates jumped from 10% to 65% w-o-w—a testament to the power of saying no to distractions and yes to customer-centric solutions.

2. Maintaining Focus on the Product Vision

The product vision is your North Star. Every yes that deviates from it dilutes your focus and impacts the team’s ability to deliver impactful solutions.

I recall a scenario where a senior executive proposed an idea that didn’t align with our roadmap. While it was tempting to say yes to show alignment, I knew it wasn’t the right decision for the product. By diplomatically explaining the potential impact on the roadmap and the product’s core value, I was able to redirect the conversation toward our strategic goals.

3. Preserving Resources (Time, Budget, and Effort)

Every request consumes resources, and as PMs, we’re gatekeepers of how those resources are used. Saying no to low-impact initiatives is essential to ensure the team works on what truly matters.

At Vishwa Samudra, an APM once wanted to build a dashboard for our material management system. Instead of approving it outright, I asked him to first analyze the data manually and talk to stakeholders to identify patterns and needs. This exercise not only saved us time and effort but also ensured we built a dashboard that addressed real user pain points.

When No Is the Right Answer

Let’s dive into some real-world scenarios where saying no is not just important but essential:

Feature Overload:
- Scenario: A stakeholder insists on adding several features to a product release because “competitors are doing it.”
- Why NO Is Needed: Unvalidated features bloat the product and dilute its value. Focus on what truly solves user problems instead.
Unrealistic Timelines:
- Scenario: The sales team promises a major feature within an unfeasible deadline.
- Why NO Is Needed: Rushed work leads to poor execution and technical debt. Protect your team’s ability to deliver quality.
Pivoting Away from the Product Vision:
- Scenario: A senior leader pushes for an idea that deviates from the roadmap.
- Why NO Is Needed: Misaligned ideas confuse the team and waste resources. Stay true to your vision.
Requests That Don’t Serve the Core User Base:
- Scenario: A VIP customer demands a feature that benefits them but offers no value to other users.
- Why NO Is Needed: Prioritizing edge-case requests risks alienating your broader audience.

The Art of Saying No

Saying no isn’t easy. It’s like standing at a crossroads, knowing that every choice shapes the product’s trajectory. It takes courage to hold your ground, empathy to understand others’ perspectives, and clarity to communicate why your decision matters. Here’s how I’ve learned to master this delicate art:

Rely on Data: Back up your decision with evidence. Numbers speak louder than opinions, especially when tensions run high. I remember showing retention metrics to illustrate why prioritizing user pain points over minor feature updates made a bigger impact. Data doesn’t just make your argument stronger; it makes it irrefutable.
Focus on Users: Always center your reasoning on the people who matter most—your users. When you frame your no in the context of improving user experience or solving user pain points, it’s hard for stakeholders to argue otherwise. I’ve often shared real user anecdotes during discussions, and those stories have consistently brought the conversation back to what truly matters.
Communicate Clearly: Be transparent about why you’re saying no. Explain your reasoning calmly, and, if possible, propose alternatives. This approach not only diffuses tension but also shows that you’re not dismissing ideas arbitrarily. Instead, you’re making thoughtful, well-informed decisions.
Build Trust: Relationships matter. When stakeholders know that you’re genuinely invested in the product’s success, they’re more likely to trust your decisions—even when they disagree. I’ve found that fostering open, ongoing conversations with teams builds mutual respect and understanding, which makes saying no less contentious over time.

Ultimately, saying no isn’t about shutting down ideas; it’s about protecting the product’s integrity and ensuring its success. It’s a skill every product manager must hone, not just for the product but for the people who rely on it.

Conclusion

Saying no isn’t about rejection. It’s about prioritization, focus, and delivering meaningful impact. As product managers, we have the responsibility to guard the product’s vision and ensure we’re solving real problems for our users. So, the next time you’re at a crossroads, remember: No isn’t just a word; it’s a superpower.

What’s the hardest no you’ve had to say as a product manager? I’d love to hear your stories! 😊

RRR's Naatu Naatu wins the Best Original Song at The Oscars!

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 06:42:24 +0530

Indian Cinema at the Oscars

In its 110-year-long cinematic journey, it is disheartening to know that a mere 4 ‘Indian’ productions have secured Oscar nominations and NEVER won the coveted award even once, despite being the second largest film industry in the world in the 1950s.

There have been glimmers of recognition in the past but Indian Cinema was majorly ‘unnoticed’ by the outside world until recently. And the worldview of Indian Cinema is changing.

So, after a good 21 years of Amir Khan’s Lagaan, when the team RRR showed up at the Oscars I couldn’t stop cheering and screaming! It was more than what I could take in.

After winning the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards beating the likes of Lady Gaga, Rihanna, & Taylor Swift for #NaatuNaatu in the Best Original Song Category, it was highly likely that RRR would win at The Academy as well!

And when the result was announced, I transcended into a different world of bliss. – There have been a few Indian representatives at the Oscars in the past but they were majorly under ‘international’ productions. And a handful of Indians even won the award: Bhanu Athaiya, Satyajit Ray, AR Rahman, and Resul Pookutty.

‘Indian’ films saw a total of 3 nominations for Best International Feature Film and 1 nomination for Best Documentary Feature so far in the past.

Though there have been Indian representations at the Oscars in the past - #RRR winning at the Oscars is such a game changer for the entire Indian movie industry. Here’s why:

RRR - a Game Changer

First Indian Movie

RRR is the first ‘Indian movie’ produced by an Indian production house, DVV Entertainment, to win an Oscar in any feature films category, it’s unprecedented! (RRR missed another chance for Best International Feature Film - blame IFC if you want!)

Huge market potential

This could open up a HUGE movie market around the world. A lot of new avenues have already been broke open, thanks to SS Rajamouli, but there’s still a long way to go…

The total movie market (theatre biz) is more than $42bn (as in 2019, when the business saw the highest numbers). India currently stands in 5th position:
US: $10.5bn
China: $9.3bn
Japan: $2.4bn
France: $1.62bn
India: $1.6bn
South Korea: ~1.6bn

There are other major markets beyond these regions, including UK, UAE etc which account to about $7.1bn where Indian movies are actively screened.

Check the box office numbers of all the countries HERE.

So, RRR could now be a golden pass for other upcoming Indian movies to capture a piece of this huge market globally where Indian movies are actively screened - opening up a potential $32bn movie market.

Increased budgets for upcoming Indian movies

This could also mean an increase in both the size of budgets and the number of big-budget movies coming from India.

The average budget of the top 10 most expensive Hollywood movies is a staggering $388mn! In comparison, the top 10 Indian movies average at a dismal $45mn - offering a significant gap for increasing investments and making bigger movies. So, the large production houses are bound to get influenced by this Oscars’ result.

Access to global talent

If the movie budgets and box office numbers don’t excite you if you are more of an ‘art’ person than a ‘commerce’ person, then - this RRR win could open doors to access global artists and global talent, from actors to actresses to technicians for the Indian filmmakers, that could lead to more and more high-quality films coming from India!

So, you can only imagine bigger, better, and grander movies coming from India in the future!

The phenomenon called SS Rajamouli

A torchbearer, and a pioneer in many ways, SS Rajamouli now leads the path to greater glory for Indian cinema at the world cinema, and has permanently changed the trajectory of Indian cinema!

With Bahubali 1 & 2, he brought the entire film fraternity together - across different languages, transcending boundaries. Now, with RRR he has truly taken Indian Cinema global. From drawing people of the country together to taking the Indian Cinema global, SS Rajamouli is in a league of his own!

His RRR has grossed INR 1200 Cr already and has garnered so much attention, love and thumping responses from audiences around the world.

The audience filled the theatres completely whenever the movie was screened in the US and there was a re-release after a re-release multiple times. In fact, it set up a record of getting sold out in a mere 98 seconds when the tickets opened for booking in a 932 seater TCL’s Chinese Theatre in LA. The world was astounded by this craze!

And the movie is the highest-grossing Indian movie in Japan!

Awards for RRR

It has received multiple awards including from Hollywood Critics Association, LA Film Critics Association Awards, New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival, Hawaii Film Critics Society, Kansas City Film Critics Awards, and many others.

Check all the awards HERE.

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Congratulations to SS Rajamouli, NTR Jr, Ram Charan, MM Keeravani, Prem Rakshit, Chandrabose, Rahul Sipligunj, Kaala Bhairava and the entire team of RRR for truly ‘bringing back the glory of Indian Cinema!’🕺🏻💃🏻🕺🏻💃🏻🕺🏻💃🏻🕺🏻💃🏻

Also, congratulations also to the team of Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers for winning an Oscar for Best Documentary Short! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

But the win by RRR is taking away all the media light!

Thanks for reading!

Check out my other articles too…

16 Product Management Tools That Will Make Your Life Easy

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 19:43:32 +0530

Introduction

Over the past few years of working as a Product Manager, I have realised that a Product Manager needs to have a good grasp and control over a lot of things which cannot be left to chance. Doing this, with multiple stakeholders, a variety of user problems, and a bunch of different types of users is a nightmare if you are not equipped sufficiently.

So, to help other Product Managers or aspiring Product Managers, I have compiled a list of tools that I have benefitted from, which I think will benefit you also. This list of top Product Management tools, I believe, would help you improve your work. If you are looking for tools that help you be more effective at work, continue reading…

NOTE: I will publish another list of tools that would help you propel your personal growth. Keeping watching this space!

Ok, getting on with this one then…

For the ease of understanding, I have divided the tools as per the typical product development process:

Discover
Ideate / Brainstorm
Design
Prototype
Build
Launch
Analyse
Take feedback

This way of categorising the tools will help you understand how each tool fits in the entire product development process and also easily identify tools for any specific step that you are struggling with and need immediate help.

Discover

As a Product Manager, you could indulge in different ways of discovering user problems and pain points: face-to-face user interviews, online user interviews, surveys, market research, data analysis etc. I have suggested a few tools for conducting user interviews, and surveys and organizing the findings. The other ways of discovering - market research and data analysis - are very broad and I have left them out.

User interviews

Calendly

Calendly lets you create your availability schedule on a calendar and share it with prospective users, who can then block a slot on your calendar for user interviews.

You can also set up multiple schedules, each with a different goal and for a different user segment.

For example:

Schedule 1: Understanding user persona: 15min slots, 2 PM to 6 PM every day
Schedule 2: Problem deep-dive: 1hr slots, 11 AM to 2 PM on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday

For each type of schedule, you get a unique URL which you can share with your target users and they can block your slots as per their availability!

Find Calendly HERE

Surveys

Typeform

When it comes to surveys, I think Typeform is one of the best services out there. It is simple, intuitive, and easy to create/launch surveys. I have used other services like Survey Monkey, but I find Typeform to be much more user-friendly.

Find Typeform HERE

Online user interviews

Many times, you may not be able to do a user interview by meeting the person face-to-face due to geographical constraints or simply because you don’t have time. Though meeting in person brings a lot of credibility to the user interviews, you can make use of online meeting tools to conduct online user interviews.

Zoom

Zoom is now widely adopted after the Covid pandemic and is one of the easy-to-use services when it comes to online meetings. Zoom lets you record and save the meeting as well, which will be very handy when you want to refer to the conversation after the meeting is over.

If you want to conduct short 30 min or 45 min user interviews then Zoom is FREE. The FREE version allows meetings for up to 45 min. If you want to conduct longer meetings then you would have to purchase a subscription.

Find Zoom HERE

Google Meet

Another alternative here is Google Meet. It is FREE and does not have any time limitation per meeting. However, you cannot record the meetings in the FREE version! But hey, you can do a screen recording and audio recording of the conversation if don’t want to get the paid version. And I recommend you get the paid version, as working with screen recordings and audio recordings is very clumsy!

Find Google Meet HERE

Organising the research

It is one thing to conduct user interviews, market research and data analysis, and an altogether different things to organise the research to gather insights.

If I don’t sound too simplistic, I use very simple and easily available tools for my organisation and prioritisation of user problems.

Google Drive

Yes, you read it right! The first one is Google Drive!

Google Drive lets you store all your user interviews, market research and data in one place. You can create folders and categorise the research as per your need and refer to them whenever you want to.

I label all my user interview recordings, survey findings, and market research documents in a proper referencable manner and upload them on Google Drive.

Having everything on Google Drive also helps me share my research with others very easily! So, the collaboration also becomes effective.

Google Sheets

After you gather enough details about your users and their problems, the only thing left for you to do is identify the most critical problems. And having a list of all the problems in one place where you can collaborate with others is sufficient to do this.

I have used Google Sheets for a very long time now and this does this job!

You list all the problems, invite other folks from the design and engineering and call for brainstorming. Add more columns to mark the weights in terms of design challenges, engineering challenges, and perceived value to the user. With this information, you can see which all items need your attention and when - giving you some sight into the roadmap.

Ideate or brainstorm

When it comes to brainstorming, I think nothing beats brainstorming in person. Or I haven’t come across any tool that is good enough for all three departments, Product, Design and Engineering to brainstorm together online!

Design

The design process could be simply broken into two parts: Low-fidelity designing or wireframing High-fidelity designing

Wireframing

Over time, I realised that it is easier to convey things by drawing them rather than by writing them. I mean, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? So, wireframing is very important, hence it calls for a good wireframing tool!

Balsamiq

I have used Balsamiq for over 5 years now and would recommend it to anyone who is looking to make low-fidelity designs. They have launched Balsamiq Wireframes recently which comes with a 1-month trial period, after which you need to purchase a cloud subscription.

But the older one, Balsamiq Mockups (for which they stopped support) is still FREE. And I think Balsamiq Mockups is still good and does a decent job of getting out some basic sketches.

Find Balsamiq HERE

High-fidelity designing

Figma

There are a good number of design software in the market: Figma, Sketch, Adobe InDesign etc.

I worked with Figma and InDesign. With what I have experienced, I would recommend Figma as I feel it is easier to collaborate, share ideas and work on the go using Figma. In fact, I use Figma for a lot of my personal works as well - from creating pictographs to company logos to email templates and the best thing is it’s FREE.

However, if you want to collaborate with others in the team then you need to get a paid version.

Prototype

Also, Figma allows you to create prototypes from the design interfaces you have created. This is particularly important because it is an easy, no-code, less engineering effort way to get the complete experience of the actual product. You can take this prototype out to the real-world users and ask them to try it out and gather feedback and incorporate further changes if required before you push it off to engineering. This saves a lot of time, effort and rework by the engineering team!

Sidenote: Figma was acquired by Adobe, the maker of InDesign! So, either Figma or InDesign, you would be using an Adobe product!

Find Figma HERE

Build the product

One important job for me as a Product Manager after the prototype is tested is to get it developed by the engineering team. And be on top of things and ensure that the timelines are met. This is nothing but essentially project management and I cannot run away from it.

There are a good number of tools to do this, especially in the software products space. I would recommend a couple of them.

Jira

A well know name, Jira is of the most widely used software product management tools that enable managing the deliverables by various engineering and QA folks after the requirements are frozen.

Because there are multiple developers and QAs involved in building one product, managing their day-to-day tasks and tracking them could get tedious, and Jira does a decent job of making it as simple as possible. As Jira is one of the earliest tools there are many functionalities it has that you won’t find in other Project Management tools that could be used for planning, tracking and delivering a product.

Find Jira HERE

Trello

Another Project Management tool that we used in our Startup was Trello.

I haven’t worked on Trello for larger projects with many members working together, but during our startup, it was our only project management tool and I can say that it is a neat and clean tool and does a very good job in managing the tasks by multiple stakeholders. Though our was a team of 4 at our startup, Trello could be used for larger team sizes as well.

Find Trello HERE

Sidenote: Trello was acquired by Atlassian, the maker of Jira!

Product launch

Product launches could be done either by doing a controlled release (also called a Beta release or A/B testing) to a set of users or by releasing the product to all users.

For A/B testing (of web pages), there are multiple tools which offer A/B testing functionalities. The top one that I have come across is Optimizely.

Optimizely

You can use Optimizely to split your traffic to the A version (typically the old version) and B version (the new version) and validate if the new page is performing any better than the old version. You can create a variety of Optimizely experiments for your web pages using the dynamic or basic features that come with the service.

It is hassle-free to integrate and presents multiple options around targeting and prioritising the audiences, duration of the test run, and APIs for direct integration and analysis.

Find Optimizely HERE

Once the product is launched (or is ready for launch), product marketing becomes very crucial in taking it to the users. Product marketing is a subject in itself. Keeping it simple, I will just focus on the tools used for online marketing - especially through email and Push Notifications. (Note that there are many other online and offline channels of marketing: SMS, WhatsApp, blog posts, social media posts, news articles, TV, Radio etc which I am leaving out here.)

For email/push notifications, a few suggestions are Mailchimp and Hubspot.

Mailchimp

Probably the widely known name in email marketing. Mailchimp offers templates, and tools to create new templates, and provides analytics support around email open rates, and click rates, with quick and easy integration support. If you are setting up a personal brand or a small-sized business then this might be for you.

Find Mailchimp HERE

HubSpot

HubSpot offers a variety of services: CRM, marketing automation, sales automation, and customer service platform. You can email support as part of its marketing automation toolkit, but it might be too costly for you if you want to take only one service here. Hubspot is generally preferred for the gamut of services it offers.

Find HubSpot HERE

Analyse

After the product is out there in the market, in the hands of the users, you need to figure out if the product is meeting its objectives, analyse whether the users are consuming the product as expected, or figure out if there are any issues that arose after the product launch.

Again, multiple tools offer this service and there are many good tools as well. So, choose as you like.

Google Analytics

Among the many products in its portfolio, Google Analytics is one such product that is used by almost everyone I know in the Product and Technology space. From giving the basic insights around unique page views, unique users, and duration on the page, it gives more nuanced information about user acquisition channels and other engagement metrics with an option to slice and dice the data across multiple user and product dimensions.

If your Analytics is integrated with Google Ads and Google Adsense, you can get insights around the Ad Spend for customer acquisition or money made from Ads on your web/App as well!

Mixpanel

I used Mixpanel when I was at Phable care. And there are so many reasons why I like it!

It is one of the very few intuitive Analytics tools I have come across. You can build regular insights reports, funnel reports, or retention reports in just a few clicks - without any training! You can create project-based dashboards and have multiple reports in each dashboard. Download the data easily and also schedule report emailers!

Once you start using it, there won’t be any going back!

Find Mixpanle HERE

Hotjar

One primary use case I find tools like Hotjar (or Smartlook) solve is the ease of doing Landing Page analysis. It gives you a Heatmap of the page you want to analyse showing which part of the page is the user most attentive to and how deep in the page is the user scrolling.

It also records the screen while the user is on the page and saves them as anonymous recordings, which you can view to observe the patterns and user behaviours on the landing pages.

It helps in getting a quick view of how the user navigates on the page, validating whether the primary CTA is actually acting as a Primary CTA or not, or after which step is the user dropping off from the page.

Find Hotjar HERE

Take feedback

I would suggest spending more time talking to customers - either through phone calls or video calls or even better, doing face-to-face meetings.

Or talk to the sales team, and ask for very honest feedback - asking them to share recordings of user interactions will help.

Sometimes talking to the customer support executives or looking at the support tickets or escalations also gives a lot of insights into how the users have received the product.

Instead, if you think user surveys would do the job, go for Typeforms to create surveys and send them to users via email. You can, in fact, embed the Typeform links inside the product itself, so that once the user completes any significant action or event, you trigger the Typeform seeking user feedback.

These are some of the many online tools that are available. There could be better alternatives than what I have mentioned here and I would always like to know about them, please share them.

How to identify the right problems to solve?

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 19:00:10 +0530

Introduction

As Product Managers, our primary responsibility is to solve user problems and make the user’s life easy. More often than not, we are tasked to deal with one or the other complex problem with a lot of nuances, made up of smaller interconnected problems making it a complex web to address.

For example, look at the following problem statement: Increase the monthly revenue from the ‘Electronics’ product category of an e-commerce website by 10%.

It is a vague problem to work on. But you can get started by asking some questions to understand the problem better, like:

Is there enough demand for the products?
What does the user journey look like?
How does the conversion funnel look like?
Which channel offers the best scope to improve revenues?
Is the communication and messaging by the marketing team bang on?
Are there any delivery constraints?
And so on…

These are very important questions to answer and we often get swamped with so much data that it gets difficult to identify which ones to pick and work on. How do we deal with such situations?

One of the ways of doing this is by identifying or breaking the complex problem into multiple smaller sets of tasks or jobs to be done by different stakeholders along the user journey. This will help us look at a set of smaller, easily comprehendible problems rather than a gigantic web.

Example

For example, if you look at the user journey of placing an order from the above-discussed product category problem statement, these could be some of the jobs to be done:

Identify the right target user
Market (or show an Ad) to the user
Get the user to click on the marketing campaign
Make the user register
Show the user what the user wants
Make the experience smooth for the user to add products to the cart
Build a smooth payment/check-out journey
Deliver the product to the user

What does this do?

This helps break down complex problems into a series of jobs to be executed (by people) at a granular level. Because each job is at a granular level, it gets easy to identify how difficult is it for the user to do the job. The more the difficulty implies more the problem. And the more the problem more the opportunity to solve. Similarly, if each job is complicated or takes more time or effort by the user, it offers more opportunities to solve.

Ok. But, how does this help?

Once all the complex problems are broken down into a series of smaller jobs to be done by various stakeholders involved, you will end up with a simple list of jobs. And you can then choose which jobs are ‘worth solving’ based on how difficult they are and what impact they create for the user.

It helps in breaking the complex problem into granular bits giving better visibility and the ability to prioritise them.

Unable to follow?

A case study from personal life

Let me explain this by taking a very simple day-to-day scenario.

Scenario

The scenario: Abhinav is a working professional and he finds it difficult to cook rice.

If I was asked to simplify the cooking experience and make the ‘complex problem’ of cooking rice easy, how would I do it? Would I build a washing machine or an electric cooker? How do I decide what needs to be built?

Breaking down the problem

Now, if I break down this problem for the user (Abhinav), there would be 7 jobs involved as listed below:

Take one cup of rice
Rinse the rice
Put the rice in a pressure cooker
Add two cups of water
Put the pressure cooker on the stove with low flame
Wait for 3 whistles
Turn off the stove

The outcome: Cooked rice!

An easy way to make the cooking experience better for Abhinav is by identifying which of those jobs are the most difficult and simplifying them. Right?

Let’s do that.

The job, difficulty, impact matrix

To do this, let me first create a matrix with four columns:

The job to be done
The category of the job
Difficulty in doing the job
The impact created for Abhinav if the job is simplified

The category column could simply be some way of bucketing/categorising the jobs.

The difficulty and impact could be assigned on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being least difficult/impactful and 5 being most difficult/impactful.

By doing this, instead of looking at a complex problem, I will now be able to look at a list of categorised tasks, the effort required to perform them and their impact on Abhinav.

I have broken these jobs into two categories: Prep and Cook, and assigned their level of difficulty and impact.

The matrix would look something like this:

You can notice that steps 1 to 4 are simple and do not take much effort from Abhinav, hence the difficulty assigned for them is 1. And because Abhinav does not perceive much impact if these steps are solved, the assigned impact also is 1 for them.
The next two steps require Abhinav to handle the pressure cooker correctly, turn on the stove, put it on low flame and wait for 3 whistles - these are burdensome. It calls for the user’s effort, availability and attention. Hence they are assigned higher difficulty points. Solving these steps will make it that much less burdensome for the user, so the impact created for Abhinav also will be much higher if these steps are simplified.
The final step, Step 7, is also of low effort, with a difficulty of 1 point. But it is the closing and an important step. Abhinav has to turn off the stove without fail, if not the rice will be burnt. Though it does not take much effort, it is a must. Now, if this step is solved, then the perceived impact for Abhinav is very high as he does not have to worry about turning off the stove. That’s a great relief and would also allow him to focus on other activities. Hence this job is assigned an impact of 4 points if simplified.

The total difficulty of the user to cook the rice is 11 points.

Adding the Difficulty x Impact column

How do I make this entire process less difficult?

Let’s add one column to this matrix: Difficulty x Impact = product of difficulty points and impact points. The matrix would look like this:

Now, if I had to choose which jobs to work on, to give a better cooking experience, I would choose the ones with High Difficulty and High Impact.

This can be achieved by looking at the ‘Difficulty x Impact’ column, I would get the prioritised jobs as:

Prioritising the problems

So, I would like to ensure that:

The user doesn’t have to wait
The user doesn’t worry about putting the cooker on the stove with the right flame
The user doesn’t have to worry about turning off the stove

Based on this, I could ask Abhinav to use an electric cooker instead of a pressure cooker, which solves the top three challenges for him. And below will the steps he would need to follow:

Take one cup of rice
Rinse the rice
Put the rice in a pressure cooker
Add two cups of water
Put the rice in an electric cooker (the cooker will turn off automatically)

The outcome: Rice is cooked!

If we look at the matrix again, replacing the pressure cooker with an electric cooker, it would look something like this:

Final observations

With this solution (of using an electric cooker), the effort has been reduced from 11 points to 5 points, with the same outcome in both cases: cooked rice!

If you notice, I worked on the ‘Cook’ category of the problems, without worrying much about the ‘Prep’ category.

Instead, imagine if I had prioritised the ‘Prep’ category and focused on solving steps 2 or 3 or 4: rinsing of rice or automatic measurement of water quantity then I would have proposed using a washing machine for cooking rice (which sounds like a ridiculous idea!) because a washing machine does the best job in solving the rinsing and the measurement problem. However, those steps are not what the user sees as daunting or difficult. So, if I had chosen to solve steps 2, 3, or 4, I would have put all my efforts into solving the wrong problems for the user. And had this solution been proposed and implemented, it would have probably made life even more difficult for Abhinav, isn’t it?

Conclusion

Long story short, what I want to convey is, if you break down the complex problem (or process) into minor tasks or jobs, assign them their difficulty and impact, and prioritise based on their difficulty and impact levels, it becomes much clearer (and easier) to pick which parts of the seemingly complex problem to work on.

So, are you working on building a washing machine or an electric cooker?
Well, think again!

Thank you for reading. If you found this interesting, please share this with other Product aspirants!

The Value of Defaults

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 16:16:32 +0530

Let’s start with a story

I have recently migrated from an Android smartphone to an iPhone. One stark difference I saw between the both of them was in their default settings. This difference was stark yet so subtle that it’s hard to realise unless you pay attention.

Diving into the story… I remember when I was using the Android smartphone I had to follow this routine of going through my notifications at the end of the day, clearing off the irrelevant ones to figure out if anything needed my attention. However, I was often swindled by some irrelevant notification which should not have had my attention. I then, without any intention, spent the next hour or two browsing random Apps which otherwise did not provide any value to me.

After an hour-long unproductive exercise, I used to convince myself that it was probably worth spending that time. “I got relaxed. Great stress-buster,” I gave false assurance to myself. The particularly impermissible part about this was this happened day after day, every day.

Now, after I switched to the iPhone, I spend less time “relaxing” myself going through irrelevant notifications or browsing unnecessary Apps. I know exactly which notifications need my attention and when. How? you might ask.

How does iPhone do it?

It is quite simple actually. When a new App is installed on an iPhone, the Notifications preference is asked by default. It asks you how you want to receive the notifications from that App and gives you three options to choose from:

Allow immediately
- This allows the App to deliver the notifications immediately. This could be used for the ones which are important and require your attention immediately
Allow in schedule
- This is a brilliant notification feature in iPhone, one that I love the most. If this is selected, the notifications will be delivered only as per the schedule you set - like at 8 PM in the night and you won’t be interrupted in the middle of the day. Could be used for the ones which are important but do not need immediate attention
Don’t Allow
- This simply does not deliver any notifications from the App. Could be used for the ones that are not important and do not need any immediate attention

iPhone and its many defaults

Not just for notifications, the iPhone comes with many other default settings which might not even have occurred to the user, but iPhone solves it and that’s the beauty of a great product.

For example:
- ‘Allow location permission’ is disabled by default on iPhone for all Apps. Apps ask for permission before accessing the location. On the contrary, location permission is enabled by default on an Android. So, Android doesn’t give location privacy - again for the same reason that nobody wants to take that extra effort to change the default preference
- ‘Screentime’ is turned on by default: iPhone calculates the ‘Screentime’ - time spent on each App and gives you a summary of it on a daily/weekly/monthly basis
- When an iPhone is put on silent, it does not vibrate too: ‘Vibrate on silent’ is disabled by default
- It automatically turns off the Hotspot, if it is not in use for a long time
- If WiFi/Bluetooth are turned off before going to bed, iPhone turns them on by default the next day morning
- It suggests a ‘Do Not Disturb setup by default for your sleeping hours

The lazy man & his mind

The default way of asking you to choose any preference ensures that it IS set. It makes the entire exercise of changing settings very smooth and less stressful.

If the Notifications preference was not set at the time of installation of an App, it most likely won’t be changed later anyway.

Let me tell you why:

Taking any initiative (changing Notification preferences in this case) comes with a high amount of friction because it requires you to spend your energy. But you, as a human, are inherently wired to conserve energy as part of our evolution
You do not exactly know what needs to be done to change the notification settings because neither is it something that you do very often nor are you trained on it. And you don’t do it, because you don’t know it
Third, you subconsciously don’t want to spend your effort on something that snatches away your right to “relaxation.”
Fourth, if you get irrelevant notifications daily from not just one, not just two, but from many Applications, you know that you need to turn off the notification for each one of them! “Turning off notifications for one App itself seems a big task, now you’re asking me to turn them off for all of them? It is not happening. I rather not turn off any,” thinks the mind.

Asking the Notifications preference to be set by default on an iPhone ensures that I go ahead and set the preference. Without this default nudge, I bet, I would have never gone into changing the App notification settings.

What do ‘defaults’ do, anyway?

These defaults, though very trivial and minute, simplify the things we do every day and that makes THE difference in the long run. It is hard to understand how they help you if you have something by default because you get to do things without much effort, sometimes without you even noticing them and hence you hardly appreciate their value. You generally tend to value something if it was difficult for you, if it was something noticeable or if you had spent a considerable amount of time or money on it. The greater the loss, the greater the perceived value.

When something happens by default, you assume that it was ought to happen. You don’t tend to appreciate how difficult it must have been for something to happen by default. You do not realise how different things would have been in the absence of that ‘default.’

Let’s take a look at an examples.

Making life easy at home

When I was at home in Hyderabad, my mother was the one taking care of the chores, preparing food, ensuring I take care of my health and well-being and doing everything to keep the household together. And now, after marriage, my wife helps me with most of these things though she also is a working employee. (Side note: I am grateful for the women in my life!)

Now I realise the importance and significance of getting these things done by default, without my notice and realisation. Because I know that my stay in Bengaluru was a struggle as a bachelor when these things were not taken care of by default. When things happen by default, you don’t give it a damn. Remove the default and life goes haywire.

Setting the right defaults

Think about it, is there anything that is happening with you that is making your life easy? You may not realise them immediately, but I am sure there are plenty of things that are happening in your life without your intervention which are keeping your peace of mind. Those are your defaults.

Setting the right defaults leads to a great design of the product. And the same thing applies to life too. We come across defaults in our day-to-day life also. They go so subdued that they hardly get noticed. But you can take action to set these defaults.

Mutual Fund SIPs

For example, we understand the importance of investing and know that if the money is invested properly, we get a good chance of leading a more harmonious life in the long run. However, investing takes time, effort and skill and we seldom do it. But, the default of ‘monthly SIPs in a mutual fund’ comes in as a saviour. You don’t have to break your head and make a decision every month. By subscribing to a SIP, you are setting a default amount to be invested in a mutual fund. Once set, you don’t have to worry about it (unless the market sentiment looks gloomy for many years to come) and it takes care of the investment for you until you figure out more profitable investment avenues.

Lunchtime

Another example is setting your lunchtime. Earlier, I was not very punctual in having my lunch. I used to get carried away by my work, be stuck in a meeting or work on something without realising that it was getting late. Having lunch at a fixed time was a luxury, it was very rare! Over time (read: getting old 😛) I realised that not having food on time could lead to potential health issues and I had to figure out a way to fix that.

I simply set a default for that. I blocked my calendar for 1 PM - 2 PM every day for lunch, this time was blocked for lunch no matter what. With this, I had set a reminder for myself and because my calendar was blocked, my colleagues refrained from setting up a meeting during that time. I had set a default time for my lunch. And, now, more often than not, I have my lunch between the default 1 PM - 2 PM!

The reason I love Uber

Another product example of how setting a default helps is Uber. Let’s say you use Uber to travel to the office daily. It automatically updates the pickup location by default without you entering it. You just need to select the destination location, and even that would be shown in the suggestions (Uber uses your travel history from a given location and suggests the most recent and frequent destinations). All you need to do is just tap on the suggestion and confirm the booking. This simple determination and suggestion of a location by default is one of the main reasons why I am habituated to opening Uber to find a cab. Only if I do not find a cab on Uber do I open any other App. I was so tuned, that a simple default nudge (of showing/selecting a location) made my life easy and helped me form a habit, without my awareness.

The same thing is done by Swiggy as well. It picks the default address based on your location.

What else can defaults do?

Defaults don’t just make life easy. They are particularly used in high-risk situations which could lead to damage to life or property if enough attention is not paid.

The ABCs of a car

Consider the accelerator, the brake and the clutch in a car (the ABCs of a car). Their default positions ensure that torque from the engine is zero, as the accelerator is always in a zero position unless an effort is applied. Similarly, the brake functions such that if more force is applied the car comes to a halt. And the default position of the clutch ensures that the power from the engine is always transmitted to the wheels. Only when the clutch is applied, the transmission stops. Why are their default positions designed that way?

Let’s take a look. If either the accelerator or the brake or the clutch were designed oppositely, then their default positions would have resulted in: Accelerator = High, Brakes = Applied, and Clutch = Not transmitting power. This combination is ridiculous because high acceleration when brakes are applied is a contradiction. And having high acceleration as soon as you start the car would make it difficult to control and is life-threatening for you and others. On top, to get the car moving, one would have to do three things together:

Press to reduce the acceleration
Press to remove the brakes
Press the clutch to transmit the power

All three at the SAME TIME!!! That would be impossible and nobody would be driving cars. If it was like that, they would have just been vehicles to perform heroics by professional stuntmen in a circus.

The ease of operation of a car is due to its default controls. One could easily learn these controls, get training and pay little attention to managing their travel needs. Any change or reverse of these default controls, the car would become a museum product.

Minimise your losses, if not maximising gains

Defaults need to be set to ensure that even if no action is taken it minimises the loss. Make it so easy that if you don’t take any decision about something, the default will ensure that it is good enough and your losses are minimised. You also need to set a default when decision-making is bound to consume time and effort, a lack of which might harm you.

Anything where you don’t want to spend your energy, where the returns do not entice you to put in the effort, set defaults. Defaults ensure that you do not go down, they offer stability and guarantee a minimum promise to be delivered.

Defaults take a one-time effort, with returns going on for perpetuity till you change them. You will save a lot of headaches by setting defaults.

Netflix subscription, leaving your car keys on the stand beside your door, automating bill payments, setting an alarm that goes off in the morning - all these are examples of defaults that make your life a tad bit easier.

What’s in it for you?

So, what default are you going to set today? What value do you see it deliver you?

My Aunty, my Guru

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 21:34:49 +0530

How I was fortunate
It was the year 2001. My mother had already left her job in the school as a schoolteacher to pursue home tailoring in the hope that she would generate a better income by having her tailoring set up than being a teacher at a school. My father was trying to fix his private enterprise which did not have any steady flow of income. We were barely managing to make our ends meet as a family. My elder brother was in the ninth standard, my elder sister and I both were in the seventh standard.

As a typical lower-middle-class family that we were, we tried our best to maximise any opportunity that we received. And luckily for me, I somehow managed to perform well in academics. However, paying fees every month was not easy. So, as it happened my mother explored different avenues to lessen the financial burden every month: both household expenses and our school fees.

It probably is God’s will that she one day got to know about someone called ‘Sairam’ Aunty, who helped children with books, clothes, education and other basic needs. Without letting this opportunity go in vain she took us to her house, in the hope of getting free tuition and other supplements.

That was the first time I met Aunty. I did not know her name then and also for quite sometime after joining the tuition. She was still ‘Sairam’ Aunty or just ‘Aunty’ for me (and a lot of other kids) and that was sufficient. The idea of getting free tuition, books and clothes paved my way for getting into her abode. Little did I know then that what I thought I got for free then was minuscule compared to what I would eventually receive.

I owe a major part of my transformation from being a shabby and foul 12-year-old, 7th standard child to becoming the better human that I am today. If not for her, I probably would have still made it big in life, but not better. And that difference, the difference between big and better is what I learnt under her guidance.

It probably won’t be possible for me to describe, in words, the immense contribution Aunty has done in my life. I will try, nevertheless.

Getting into her fold
From a noisy neighbourhood of Rasoolpura, getting into Aunty‘s house brought about a different kind of calm and pleasant experience. When I went to her house for the first time, I saw a variety of students already sitting there. Some kids younger than me, many of my age and also some elders, predominantly girls. All of us were from the same locality, in and around Rasoolpura, and mostly belonged to modest family backgrounds. No matter what the mix was, I got to meet new people and make new friends at Aunty’s house.

We all went to her house daily. It was as if going to Aunty’shouse was part of our daily routine. Over time I realised that it was not just tuitions that we all went to Aunty. There were a lot of other activities that happened along the way, which shaped me and all the others.

Our regular tuitions
Daily in the evening from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM we had our tuition classes. Aunty religiously spent time in the evening every day teaching kids of various classes. She took turns calling children from the same class, giving them portions to learn from a topic and also conducting tests regularly.

She spent 3 to 3 1/2 hours daily helping children learn free of cost, as a form of service. It wasn’t just a shelter for most of us where we simply went to spend time. We were held responsible for what we did, what we learnt, and how we spent our time. Aunty diligently followed up with us and checked our progress. Though it was a free service from Aunty without any financial implications, we all were inherently made responsible for our education and did not take it for granted.

At her fold, receiving support for the secular/school education was just one of the activities. Apart from that, we spent a considerable amount of time doing things that helped us make progress spiritually too.

Weekly Balavikas Classes
Every Sunday, Aunty conducted Balavikas classes. Balavikas classes were my favourite. I felt happy after attending the classes. As the word itself implies, Balavikas means ‘Development of a child’. It was precisely that, and under Aunty, it was even more comfortable and fun.

The way Aunty conducted classes, they were a blend of stories, life lessons and fun-filled activities. For a child who was just about 12 years of age, a few games and some stories were a crowd puller and Aunty ensured that every child was having fun with a fair amount of entertainment along with smartly infused lessons and values for life.

The Balavikas classes were conducted for about an hour every Sunday in the evening. They typically started with a story, followed by a few games or puzzles and then by some Shlokas and concluded with Bhajans.

The stories were either from Swami’s Chinna Katha series or from the scriptures - The Ramayan or The Mahabharata or The Bhagavatham or other stories narrated by Swami himself. Through these stories, we were told of our rich history, the greatness of our past and lessons and values from our scriptures.

Each time a story was told, we were made to ponder on the leanings from it and how could we apply them in our daily life. All those stories guided us in developing a sense of moral responsibility, in distinguishing right from wrong, in choosing what to do and what not to do, wisely.

It was not as if it mattered so much for us as children. But we would eventually become adults. And that mattered. Aunty was not just telling moral stories to children. She knew she was shaping all of us to become better adults, better citizens and better humans. She was teaching us values, so that one day when we grow up, we know how to conduct ourselves - for ourselves and others.

Another interesting part of Balavikas classes that I particularly liked was the fun games and puzzles part. The games included quizzes based on our scriptures, board games like crosswords, snakes and ladders, and puzzles. All the games were so designed that they offered not just fun, but also presented human values for life. Some games were even designed by Aunty to better suit the age group attending the classes.

If not for her value-based stories and fun-filled games during the Balavikas classes, I would have compromised myself. And the sad part would not be that I compromised; the sad part would be that I wouldn’t have even known that I compromised myself.

Bhajans at Aunty’s house
We had weekly Bhajans every Thursday and monthly Bhajans on the second Tuesday every month. Bhajans not only helped us relax from the regular study schedule but also made us do the ‘Namasmaran’ of God. For an otherwise wandering mind, Bhajans helped focus on a single thing for a brief amount of time. The effects of doing Namasmaran, just like doing any Sadhana, were so subtle and transformative that I did not realise how I had better control over my tongue over time.

Though bad at singing, I was allowed to sing Bhajans once in a while. I was scared initially. Singing, especially in front of 20-30 other people, was something that I had never done in my life. But Aunty helped me push out of my comfort zone, she trained me and made me do the impossible. That boosted my confidence to present myself in front of an audience and made me a confident person. If not for her, it would have taken me many more years to break out of my self-contained bubble.

Also, at the end of every Bhajan, we gave Aarthi to Bhagwan. It was either Aunty or Uncle who usual performed Aarthi, but given any special occasion, the students also got an opportunity and that moment was a moment of joy. It was quite a privilege to give Aarthi. But getting the privilege was not easy! We had to do something extraordinary to deserve the chance. Something like, getting first place in the school final exams or winning cultural or sports competitions at the school or doing well at a district level or state level competition. Though doing Bhajans had its inherent perks, the opportunity to give Aarthi fuelled us to excel in other areas as well.

Monthly Narayana Seva
Another regular activity for us was the monthly Narayana Seva which happened on the third Sunday every month. The Narayana Seva was conducted as part of the service activities of Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organisations by the Begumpet Samithi. Under the guidance of Swami (Sri Sathya Sai Baba), Narayana Seva formed a core part of the ‘Serve All’ mission.

Once a month, we provided medical aid, food and clothing to the needy and the underprivileged. All these people gathered in the old airport premises and we had the opportunity to serve them irrespective of their age or background or community. A bunch of Aunty’s students participated in these service activities religiously, month on month.

We were involved in cleaning the premises, vegetable cutting, setting up the tents, arranging chairs, providing help for cooking food in large quantities, assisting in medicine distribution, guiding the visitors with relevant information, offering prayers and doing bhajans.

For me, it was a sort of a break from the regular affairs of school, TV and games.

Never did we think of doing these extra activities as a burden or struggle. I think we derived joy out of helping others because we inherently knew that it was our way of paying back for receiving free tuition, books, life lessons and whatnot!

Most of Aunty’s students have imbibed this quality to ‘help others and serve others’. This can be largely attributed to the monthly Narayana Seva in which we participated and offered our service selflessly.

You know, when you’re a kid you don’t realise all these happening to you. You don’t realise the importance of service or offering help to someone. At that age, things just happen to you because of the environment you are in, and before you know it, your life has already been shaped by all the events in that environment. Such was my case too. I did not realise how important and transformational these activities were but they have changed me as a person, none of which was possible without Aunty.

Becoming a better person
Another aspect that I was privileged to witness under Aunty’s guidance was her constant pursuit to do good and be the best version of myself. She has personally made me push myself further and farther and in the right direction. At a time when there were not many in my life to guide me on the right path, Aunty was always there. She, time and again, helped me make the right decisions. Her wish and desire for me to do well is something I cannot even explain.

For me to do well, she wanted me to study in the Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary School, Puttaparthi. So, during my 10th grade, I sent my application to SSSHSS. I waited in great hope for a response from the institute. But unfortunately, my application was not accepted. I still remember my feeling that day. I felt bad and I cried. I felt like an underachiever and was running low on my confidence. But Aunty’s words and motivation gave me the courage and confidence to work harder and improve myself.

“If not Higher Secondary School, we can try again later. Swami has some other plans for you,” she said.

I gained myself, worked harder and got into NIT Warangal. It was a moment of pride for Aunty and I felt good.

As I had to go to Warangal, I couldn’t meet Aunty so often during my engineering days. But I tried to visit her whenever I came to Hyderabad. I informed her of my progress and sought her guidance whenever needed. During one of the semesters, we didn’t have enough money to pay the hostel fees. At my mother’s request, Aunty arranged for financial help and I couldn’t thank her enough for that.

As part of the campus placements at NIT Warangal, I got placed. It was on November 23rd, Swami’s birthday. Aunty was elated when I shared the news. After congratulating me, she asked if I would be interested to pursue an MBA at Swami’s college.

“Why don’t you apply for an MBA there,” she said.

I did not have any plans to do an MBA till then. At NIT Warangal, I just focused on getting a job and was excited that I got placed at one of the top Communications & Networking companies in the world. But I also knew that after missing out on my selection for Higher Secondary School, there was an unfulfilled void in me that wanted me to pursue some form of education in any of the Sai Schools. So, I thought of giving it a shot.

It was not for doing an MBA that I wanted to apply. I just wanted to study in a Sai School, under Swami’s direct instructions. So I applied. After my application was selected I went through their selection process - Aptitude Test, Group Discussion and an in-person interview. I again waited for the results and this time I was selected.

I took Aunty’s blessings and went on to complete my MBA.

MBA at Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher changed my perspective towards life. It helped me become a better human being. And this was only possible because Aunty knew that this was the best for me. Though I reap the fruits of doing an MBA at Puttaparthi, it was her will, her wish and her dream.

As I stand where I am today and look back, I owe a lot of my successes and achievements to Aunty. She stood there for me, guiding me, wishing the best for me and praying for my well-being.

I believe, her blessings and love will always be there by my side. And every part of my happiness will be shared by her too, always. With this constant belief, I will always strive to do my best and make her proud.

Thank you, Aunty. I am today because you were.

How the iPhone disappointed me!

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 14:10:54 +0530

Despite the widespread belief that the iPhone is a product manager’s marvel, I do see some very infuriating features (rather the lack of them) that when I switched from an Android to iPhone, I was disappointed. Not just disappointed, I felt lost, helpless and angry.

I wouldn’t have bought a new phone had Xiaomi given an Android OS upgrade from Nougat to Oreo, but that was not going to happen. I didn’t mind working on the Nougat OS either but I had just one problem - Slack deprecated its App for the Nougat OS and Slack is our company’s internal communication App! So, in a way, I was forced to buy a new phone. 🤷🏻‍♂️

One major requirement for me was to have a small and sleek phone. I did not want to carry a bulky, huge, not-fitting-in-my pocket kind of a phone. When I searched the market for a suitable option, iPhone was the only option with smaller screen sizes. It was hard for me to consider iPhone (from Android) as the best option, but I did. I bought the iPhone 12 Mini.

It took a while for me to get adjusted to the iOS ecosystem, but I got a hang of it in a few days. I love some of the features and use them daily, but I also miss some beautiful and simple features which I enjoyed on my Android.

I am not going to talk much about the ‘good’ features here, I just want to vent out my frustration of missing some valuable features which I enjoyed on Android.

A few things that made me regret my decision of buying an iPhone:

The battery life is among the poorest in the market. Even one full charge doesn’t come in handy for a day, with modest phone usage. I generally charge my phone thrice in two days
One very infuriating thing that made me feel completely helpless was the call recording features. As part of my job, I do customer interviews and record conversations for analysis and insights. I enjoyed the auto call recording feature on my Note 4. Not only does the iPhone not have the call recording option, but there are no good options even in the App Store! I searched for various options: good Apps (without issues) or other workarounds for about 4 hours but to no use
The call history is another frustrating thing. iPhone doesn’t store the call history dating long back (it doesn’t display at least). I can hardly see the call history dating back to a few days, that’s it! I cannot see if I have called someone a couple of weeks, I just cannot!! On Android, I could find the entire call history of my contacts - going back even 5 years!
Another issue related to calls, iPhone merges all the calls - from WhatsApp, Skype, Signal, FaceTime, regular calls - and shows them in the call history. Many times, when I want to make a regular call I tap the user in the call history and it triggers a WhatsApp call, which is frustrating
I have two SIMs on my phone. My outgoing service is active only on one SIM, not on the other and I have set the outgoing SIM as the default SIM for all the outgoing calls. Despite this, if a user calls me on another SIM and I try to call them back, iPhone calls them from this another SIM, not my default SIM. I mean, I made one SIM default so that I do not have to switch SIMs, hello?
The default calculator is another irritating App. Earlier, in the MI Note, I was able to see what my previous calculations were. If I had done a series of operations, say, 14540 x 24 + 13500 x 12 - 100000, then I was allowed to scroll up and see what my previous punched in numbers were. But the iPhone calculator does not even provide a view of what my previous punched in number is, or in fact, what my previous performed operation is!
Assume you are watching a video on your phone. In any normal Android phone, when you get a notification you can swipe up on the notifcation to hide it (which you can view later), left or right to remove it - you may want to remove the notifcation from the notifications bar because you know it is irrelevant and you don’t want to look at it later also. You don’t get that ease in an iPhone. You can hide the notification by swiping up. Swiping left or right on the notifcation doesn’t work. If you want to kill the notification, you should swipe down on it to expand the notification content and swipe down again to kill it! I just don’t understand why a left/right swipe is not allowed!
Another issue related to the notifications is that I am not allowed to kill a notification on the notifications bar by a simple right or left swipe. The right swipe opens the App pertaining to that notification. Left swipe shows three actions that I can perform on the notification: Manage, View or Delete. Additionally, tapping on the notification also opens the respective App. So, if I want to open the notification, there are three different ways to do it! Why such redundancy for opening the notification, while no easy way to kill the notification? For me, killing a notification is as equally important as viewing it. And later I discovered that, I can kill a notification by swiping left on the notification from the right most edge to the left most edge which is even more irritating than simply swiping left and clicking on ‘Delete’. Why can’t the right swipe be used to kill the notification?

Will add more to this list as I find other infuriating issues.

Do you have your frustrations when it comes to the iPhone? Do let me know!

Please note that iPhone is a fantastic phone and there is a reason why it is one of the most widely used products in the world. This post only highlights the aspects which I thought were very basic and should be included; I’ll probably do another post talking of its marvellous features.

That is for some other day!

Things That Made Me Smile - Part 02

Sun, 31 Oct 2021 13:47:22 +0530

Hello!👋🏼

If you think that you are having or have had a tough time in your career, finding a job or choosing one, be assured that you are not alone. There are a plenty of others who are just like you and like me, riding this turbulent wave. In fact, I reckon that all those who are reading this have had their share of soul searching too amidst the job search!

In this article, I’ve tried to talk about a few memorable experiences I have had in my corporate journey. I hope you relate to them 🤞🏼

NOTE: This is the second in a series of articles on ’things that made me smile’.
If you haven’t read the first part, please read: Part 01 ✅

The tale of becoming a Treeb

We worked on our startup WhatsDplan for more than 18 months when we decided to call it a day. After we decided to shut down our operations at WhatsDplan, I had to find another job. I already had a bruising experience at finding jobs after my MBA and I just knew that finding a job again was not going to be easy.

I knew I was passionate about building products and wanted to try hard to get into some kind of a Product role - even as an associate or as an analyst. But the search ahead was going to be another turbulent ride, I realised later.

I applied for all the startups (funded!) in Hyderabad and in Bengaluru - I went to their website, noted their ‘career’ email id and wrote them an email. All my attempts were futile. I did not get even a single response. It made me wonder whether those emails were checked by any recruiter at all! I asked some of my friends from NITW and also reached out to some of the founders in my network if they could refer me to any company. Some of them tried, some of them didn’t. But all the attempts did not get me even a single call.

I then thought of broadening my search. Thought of keeping myself open for other roles as well. I thought Sales is one option that would help me do a customer-facing job and gain insights around user behaviour, needs and also about the market in general. Though I wanted to get into Product, I thought that even Sales gave me a lot of avenues to explore, learn and understand. Also, there was some amount of pressure from the family, and the people around in general.

And I was just out of a ‘failed’ startup, so I wanted to validate myself, test myself again. See if I could really add some value to any company and contribute something tangible in any way possible. I mean, when you are going through a rough phase in your life even the smallest of achievements and the smallest of applause seem miraculous, they give hope and instill the faith again that life will still go on. They say, ‘doobne waale ko tinke ki sahara hi bohut hoti hai’ (even a tiny twig is enough for a drowning man). I too felt like a drowning man, searching for that ‘tinka’, that light at the end of the tunnel.

I reached out to a few of my friends again, saying I was open to Sales roles as well. I just hoped if I could get even a single call, just for the sake of it - to keep my morale afloat.

Within a couple of days, Dos (Vijay Chander Dosapati, whom we call Dos) sent me a Territory Sales Manager profile at Treebo. It felt like a decent role and I applied for it.

Though it was like one of the hundred emails and job applications I sent, it felt different. It just felt like it had some good vibe. I had to send an email to Sugandh Jalan, Cluster Head, Hyderabad. I drafted the email at around 5 PM in the evening, ensured that it had no grammatical errors and conveyed the message - my interest and competence clearly. I clicked ‘Send’. Read the email again, after sending. 🤷🏻‍♂️

After sending the email, the anxiety and eagerness took over again. I tried not to worry too much about it, but I couldn’t. My heart skipped a beat at every email notification I received on my phone. After going through so many rejections, I just hoped this was different.

It was late in the night and I still did not get any response. I hoped that I may get a response the next day and tried to sleep. Suddenly my phone beeped. I saw a notification, a message from Sugandh. My heart skipped a beat again, this time even my breath heaved. I was scared, I guess, I did not check the message on my phone. I opened my laptop instead - trying to add some delay. (Do people even do such things!)

As I opened Gmail on my laptop, I saw an unread message with the first line, ‘Hi Arjun, Thanks for reaching out.’ I gathered some courage and opened it. ‘I have forwarded it to the HR, she will reach out to you shortly’, it read.

I gave a sigh of relief, I was certain I would get an interview call now, thank god! After almost two years of joblessness (counting the time I spent on our startup), I finally got an interview call, finally! Wow! This was my first interview call after 3 and a half years, so I was both excited and anxious.

I just wanted to do my absolute best but was also worried a little as it was for a Sales role, for which I did not have much experience, technically. Though I ran Sales, Operations and everything business/product in our startup, I was not sure how much of that experience would be considered in this interview (I just didn’t know then. Now, I know it counted a lot!).

The HR called within a couple of days. She explained to me the selection process - two rounds of interviews, one on phone and another in person. She also asked me about my interest in joining Treebo, educational and work experience, the startup journey, last drawn CTC (which I disclosed naively. Pro tip: Never disclose your CTC in the first call!) among other things. She was checking my communication skills and culture fit, perhaps. ‘I will schedule your first round in the next week’, she concluded.

The first round was with Akhil Gupta, Cluster Head Mumbai. I did some research on Linkedin, tried to gather more details that could help me in the interview - any regional affiliations or common connections - nothing. No help there.

The day of the interview arrived and I got a call. I felt that it was like a casual conversation. I was asked a few questions about my startup and my interest in Sales, for which I was thoroughly prepared. I answered rather easily. He then asked me about my location preference, my expectations, about the hospitality industry, how I increased Sales at our startup, why we quit the startup among other things. It went fine, I was not intimidated and answered as if I already knew the question paper before the exam. I was confident I would get through.

The HR called the next day and confirmed my selection into the next round - an in-person interview with Sugandh, three days from then.

I still remember the day. I wore a light coloured shirt gifted by Divya Ganti, it was some shade of pink - I’d have to do some research to give the name of the exact colour! The colour coincidentally matched with the file I was carrying - the file was Ramesh’s, which I took and never returned. I guess, it simply feels good to use something which belongs to a friend, knowing that he/she wouldn’t mind!

To ensure that I won’t be late I started early and took a cab to Vamsiram’s Jyothi Square, Banjara Hills. I tried to maintain composure all along the cab ride and tried not to bite my nails (I have this super bad habit of biting nails!). Crossed my legs and tried to relax. I noticed that my shoes (which I wore in Chennai while working at Standard Chartered) were worn out. ‘Would this affect my overall presentation? Presentation is crucial in Sales, isn’t it?’ I thought… Mind is a monkey, you see!

Anyway, I reached the destination about 10 minutes early. The office building was more of a residential apartment rented out to offices, rather than a full-fledged corporate building. As I entered the building’s parking space, I saw a board listing all the offices there. ‘Treebo Hotels - 4B’, I read and took the elevator to the 4th floor.

I fidgeted with my file all the way to the 4th floor, adjusted my shirt and my sleeves and stepped out of the elevator. ‘4B’, I saw, as soon as I stepped out and was taken aback a little. The entrance into the office was a door, just like a regular door to our houses with a knob to push and twist to open.

I took a deep breath, pushed the button and twisted the knob. Nothing happened. My palms were sweaty. I rubbed them against the dark coloured pant I was wearing and tried to twist the knob again. It didn’t turn! I pushed the button harder this time and tried again. It didn’t budge.

I released it, took a step back and tried to examine it. I wondered if I was doing anything wrong! I pushed the button again and rotated the knob the other way round this time. Nothing happened. All of this was adding to my anxiety and then suddenly my phone rang. I was startled. I took the phone out of my pocket, ‘Sugandh Treebo’, it read.

‘Hi Sugandh’, I picked the call.

‘Hey Arjun, I am just on my way to the office. I will reach in another 15 minutes, he said.

‘Oh, okay. I just reached’, I replied.

‘Cool, you can wait on the 4th floor’, he said.

‘Sure’, I said and he cut the call.

I looked at the knob again and nodded my head acknowledging the unnecessary suspense it created. I tried to relax a bit. I waited there in the corridor, staring down a large window in the corner. I looked at the vehicles and pedestrians passing by in the hot summer afternoon and tried to calm my anxious self. ‘Time passed rather slowly’, I thought.

The elevator chimed finally and out came Sugandh.

‘Hi Arjun’, he said taking the keys out of his pocket.

‘Hi Sugandh, how are you?’ I asked.

‘I am good. How about you?’ he replied trying to open the door - pushing and twisting the knob, just like what I did a while ago.

‘I am good too. Excited about the interview’, I tried to build some conversation.

‘Sure’, he said and entered the office.

I followed him inside. It was one open hall with a few cabins and one conference room in the corner. Entering a closed room in the summer had a compelling effect, Sugandh turned on the air conditioner immediately. He entered the conference room, placed his bag on the table and called me in. He sat at one side of the table and asked me to sit on the other side. I placed my file on the table and sat opposite to him.

‘So Arjun, tell me about yourself’, he asked nonchalantly, flipping the pages in my file. I too gave a regular answer which I almost memorized word-by-word.

He spent a few moments and studied my profile.

‘Are you sure you want to apply for Sales? You are fit for a Product role’, he said.

I was surprised when he said that and was happy that somebody felt I had a profile fit for a Product role. I never expected a hiring manager to say that to me during an interview. Amidst this I had a sudden rush of adrenaline - I wondered if this could turn into a Product interview, that made me worry a bit as I was not prepared for a Product interview.

‘Well, even I tried for Product roles over the past few months but couldn’t get any call so far. Even at Treebo, I couldn’t find any Product opening. So, I opened myself for other opportunities as well’, I said.

‘Ok. Let me talk to the HR’, he said dialling on his keypad.

I sat there with a mixed bag of emotions - I was happy that someone thought of considering me for a Product role, a bit perplexed as the hiring manager was calling the HR during the interview and worried if it would turn into a Product interview for which I wasn’t prepared. And it was all happening at once, suddenly.

Sugandh spoke to the HR, informed about the ongoing interview and enquired if there were any Product openings. He then listened to the response from the other side and cut the call.

‘Yaar, we don’t have any Product openings right now. Let’s do one thing, I will go ahead with this interview and if everything goes well we can relook at moving you into Product after a few months’, he said.

‘Sure!’ I agreed, relieved and sad at the same time.

‘Why Sales?’ he then asked.

My idea was to do a customer-facing role that would give good exposure to user needs and also understand the market better - something that I felt I lacked during our startup. I told him the same thing.

He then gave me a couple of situations to roleplay, he was the customer and I had to sell him the product. From my experience at the startup and knowledge from a few movies about how Sales was done, I tried to talk about the features of the product and persuaded him a little. My pitch was not so convincing, I thought. It would be entirely different if I had to do it now. But I answered all his queries about the product and explained how it would benefit him over other products he was using. He nodded in agreement.

He then gave some monthly numbers of a hotel: total expenses, average occupancy, sales margin, average room price and asked me to determine the optimal revenue strategy. I did some calculations and explained to him my projections.

He inquired further about my date of joining and if I was willing to relocate to Bengaluru if required. After discussing these for a while he asked the most important question of all - my expected CTC. I could give 100 tips on how to negotiate a salary now, but back then I was exposed and naive, I did not do well in that area. I gave a number and Sugandh immediately said that it was not possible - a negotiation tactic, perhaps. I tried to explain my point but he said they could give only so much increase over the last drawn CTC (I had disclosed the last drawn CTC earlier, remember? 🤦🏻‍♂️)

It was a tricky situation for me. I kind of nodded in agreement but tried to ask more.

‘Anyway, let me check with the team about it!’ he snapped.

‘Ok, sure’, I said.

He then asked about my family, where I lived, how I would commute etc. He told that that was it, the interview was over. I thanked him and left.

On the way back, I felt good that the interview went well, but was a little apprehensive about the salary at the same time. ‘What if they trick me because of my situation and offer me too low a salary’, I thought.

Just like any candidate after an interview, I too was restless with bursts of annoyance and excitement for the next few days. But I had no other option, I had just had to wait.

‘Hi Arjun, Archana here from Treebo’, I finally got a call after about 4-5 days.

‘Hi Archana’, I replied becoming alert at once.

‘So, we’re glad to inform you that you have been selected for the role’, she said with a hint of calmness in her tone.

‘Oh ok, thanks!’ I said, trying to hide my emotions too.

‘After discussing with the team and Sugandh, we’d like to offer you this…’, she quoted a figure.

I was pleasantly surprised and couldn’t contain my smile as it was higher than what I had hoped for.

‘Ok, so is that the final offer?’ I asked, knowing it was a stupid question and regretted it instantly. I mean, I did not know what else to say and knew her response too!

‘I think this is on par with your expectations, right?’ she replied unapologetically, as expected.

‘Yes, yes’, I assured her.

‘So, if you are fine with it, I can send you the offer letter immediately’, she sought my confirmation.

‘Umm… Yes, I think I would like to go ahead with the offer’, I confirmed.

‘Great! I will send you an email, please confirm on that’, she said with a pleasant tone.

‘Ok, sure’, I agreed and went inside my room, opened my laptop and kept staring at the screen, waiting for the email.

If the laptop took a photo that time, I would have had a portrait of what I’d call, ‘relaxed smile’ with me today.

to be continued…

Things That Made Me Smile - Part 01

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 01:56:08 +0530

As you try to find your place in this world, you are busy — either doing something or trying to figure out whether to do it or not. In this pursuit, you sometimes figure your way out and sometimes you simply get lost. And if you are fortunate enough you’ll find some precious moments along the way, moments that make you smile, even in the most mundane of activities. It is probably those tiny little things that help you get along with a lot of other not-so-tiny ones. Ever thought so?

Just like you, I too have had a fair share of some such priceless moments, reminiscing of which simply gives me joy. So, for the joy I derive out of reminiscing, I’ve compiled some such personal stories. Stories that made me think and wonder and smile and most importantly taught me to be grateful for everything around me. That it is these tiny, little moments brushing past us unnoticeably which truly make us and define us.

I hope they bring a smile to your face too. 😊

The tale of two 5th graders

I studied at Kasturba High School in Rasool Pura, Hyderabad. It was a decent English medium school in our locality, walkable from our home. It was so close that I used to come home every day for lunch and then go back to school again. Almost all the students were from in and around the same area only.

We all were not from high earning families and most of my friends struggled to pay the school fees in time. Having pocket money in those days was a luxury. Even a single Rupee in the pocket was like a privilege. It was very unusual for us to get money from our parents, so whenever we somehow managed to get any money, we got ecstatic.

It was during my 5th grade. Our lunch break was from 12 PM to 1 PM and most of us went home to have lunch. On our way back to school after lunch, some of our parents gave us a Rupee or two, sometimes, if we got lucky! So, we bought candies, chips, tamarind sticks, lollipops or anything that fit our budget on our way back to school. However, that happened very rarely with me as I didn’t get pocket money quite as often as others!

Fortunately, for me, however, one of my friends, Naresh, used to get money from his parents more often than I did. We both used to sit together in the third row, and I was the lucky one to get a share of what he bought after lunch!

One day, after our lunch break I came early to the class. Other students entered, but there was no sign of Naresh. Our social teacher also entered the classroom and started the lecture. ‘Would he come?’ I wondered.

The class was almost silent — post-lunch drowsiness already kicked in probably. The teacher was saying something about India and its states. Social was not my favourite subject, but I tried to listen to the lecture anyway.

‘May I come in, sir?’ I heard a familiar voice. Sir nodded his head and Naresh entered the class.

I was a little relieved. My focus suddenly shifted and all I could do at that moment was justify why he was late. ‘He’s late probably because he had to go to the Kirana store nearby and buy some candies!’ I thought.

As he approached the desk, I grew more anxious.

‘Did you get something?’ I whispered as he sat down.
‘What?’ he questioned.
‘Did you get something to eat?’ I whispered a little louder.
He nodded in disapproval, with a slight disappointment on his face.

I smiled back and continued to listen to the class.

A few moments into the class, I noticed that Naresh was trying to adjust himself and sit properly. As I squinted from the corner of my eye trying to figure out what he was up to he was still again, did not move. I continued with the class. Again, he was fidgeting around the desk. I turned completely this time, looking right at him. He had a huge smile on his face, and his right hand was inside his pocket. I heard feeble sounds of wrapper crackling and kept staring at him.

He then raised his eyebrows and tried to pull something out of his pocket. The moment I realised that he was about to take something out, a loud giggle erupted from my mouth. My eyes twinkled with joy and my face was full of smiles as I saw a big packet of masala chips emerge out of his pocket.

He gently laid the packet onto the lower shelf of our double desk and pushed it towards me. I smiled in all the glory and grabbed the packet.

It was a struggle to finish eating those chips during the classes that day, but we did our job!

The tale of my ride to the college

Fast forward a few years, I was in my 12th. My college was in SR Nagar, a bustling locality full of colleges and students aspiring to get into the IITs and NITs. It was about 4KM from my home. I walked from my home to the bus stop, took a bus to SR Nagar and then walked again for about 10 minutes to reach the college.

Sometimes I got late for the class. You know, one or the other reason held me back. Sometimes, I started late from home because my mom wouldn’t have packed the lunch box. Sometimes the buses didn’t come on time or I try to avoid getting into them because they were overcrowded. Or the worst, there just was too much traffic to cause the delay. No matter what the reason was, I did not enjoy being late. But it was like a curse for me, I just couldn’t avoid it.

My first class was Physics. Though I did well in the class, my Physics teacher, whom we called Shankar Sir, was a bit annoyed that I used to be late. There were instances of being late by more than 10 minutes, so he had all the right to be annoyed! Though it was not a regular affair, I too felt embarrassed as I entered the class when I was late, with everyone staring at me, giggling and smiling all they could!

I tried my best not to be late, but things just don’t work your way always, do they?

One day, just like any other day, I was doing my bit to reach the college on time. I started early from my home, reached the bus stop well before my usual time. And waited. I was very confident that I’d make it in time that day.

I kept staring down the road, towards my right, checking the bus numbers hoping one of them would be mine. I waited for a good 10 minutes — shifting my weight from one leg to the other, adjusting my backpack, glancing people move around. Still, there was no sign of my bus.

As I was growing a little restless I heard a voice from my behind calling out my name loudly. ‘Who would call me, at the bus stop,’ I ignored. I heard my name again, this time followed by a couple of claps. I reluctantly turned around and was surprised to see my Physics teacher waving his hand and calling out my name. I very gently raised my hand as if I was trying to say, ‘Present, sir’.

He signalled me to hurry up and get inside his car. He had recently bought a brand new Hyundai Santro, the car still had a temporary registration number plate.

I felt a little hesitant and didn’t quite know what to do. He signalled again, with his hand, gesturing me to come fast.

I was joyous from the inside. There he was, my Physics teacher, offering me a lift! I controlled myself from smiling too much, walked towards him, wished him good morning and got into the car.

It was a silent ride for the most part, except when my teacher asked me about my family, my whereabouts and how I commuted daily. I answered and gave him an occasional smile as if trying to say, ’thank you, sir.’

After about 12 minutes, we reached our college. ‘Coming to the college in a car felt a lot different,’ I thought. When we reached the college, he parked the car inside the campus.

It was the busiest hour of the day with all the students and the faculty reaching the college around that time. I had to get out of the car amidst all this, and I was shy and jubilant at the same time. As I got out of the car, the same people who caused me embarrassment in the class looked at me in awe. The bewilderment was palpable and I just couldn’t control blushing.

Going to the Physics class was not the same again.

The tale of an unbooked train ticket

Fast forward a few more years, I went on to study at NIT Warangal. I will cover other funny engineering stories in a separate post, this story is about the time of my graduation.

As cliched as it may sound, I joined MBA after engineering 🤷🏻‍♂️ and our graduation ceremony at NIT Warangal was announced after our MBA had started. By the way, I completed my MBA from Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Puttaparthi. The institute was rather very strict about students leaving the campus during the semester and had no-nonsense policies around taking leaves and not attending classes. So, I had to apply for leaves upfront and plan my journey. I applied for leave for exactly 3 days — Friday, Saturday, and Monday and booked my onward journey tickets from Puttaparthi to Hyderabad.

I was very excited about going to the graduation ceremony, as I would get to meet all my friends again! Another tidbit about SSSIHL, we had very little contact with the outside world during our semester. The only mode of communication with the outside world was email and a landline phone, believe me!! So, this added to the excitement even more, and I was eager to meet them. Some of them joined MBAs like me, but most of them took nice jobs offered during our campus placements.

The day of my journey arrived and I left Puttaparthi on Thursday evening and reached Hyderabad on Friday morning. In the evening, a bunch of us took the regular Intercity-Express from Hyderabad to Warangal. It was nice meeting everyone again after such a long time. We reached the college and the excitement of graduation was everywhere, and the atmosphere was electric. The entire campus was fully decorated, welcoming us! The students had come from different parts of the country, coming back to the alma mater was always special and a matter of pride, after all!

We all were having a superb time. After going around the campus for a while, we had our dinner and settled in our juniors’ rooms :) to take some rest for the big event — the graduation ceremony.

Amidst all the partying and madness, there was a constant worry in my head. The plan was, we stay on the campus on Saturday (the day of graduation), leave for Hyderabad on Sunday afternoon or evening, and start back to Puttaparthi on Monday evening. The plan had to be followed meticulously, any delay otherwise would cause me trouble when I reached Puttaparthi.

So, I had to start back to Puttaparthi on Monday evening, but I had not booked my return journey ticket! I was worried, not because I didn’t book but because I didn’t have enough money to book 😐 I felt terrible and hesitated to ask someone to book, I resisted myself. Although it seemed like the easiest thing to just ask a friend to book a ticket, I did not have the courage. I kept delaying it knowing for a fact that I still had a couple of more days to book. Anyway, as I did not have a way out yet I slept over it believing I could figure it out later.

The ceremony was in the evening, so we got up leisurely, wandered in the hostel, met more people, our batchmates and juniors. Enquired about college, the campus, our faculty, the placements. Made noise, had some unworried and carefree talk in the corridors till the evening. We then got ready for the event and went to the college auditorium. Our first graduation, we had a merry time! After about 6 hours of greetings, speeches, awards, prizes, photos, food, drinks, songs, dances and a lot of nonsense, we returned to the hostel.

And the dreadful hour had finally arrived. All of us started to talk about when we were returning to our respective places. As guys took turns, I just waited, a bit unsure, a bit worried.

‘I will be starting on Monday evening from Hyderabad’, I paused. ‘But, you know, I haven’t booked my return tickets yet. Hopefully, I will get to book them in Tatkal tomorrow!’ I said shrugging my shoulders.

‘Can someone help me book tickets tomorrow?’ I finally managed to mumble. After I said that, it felt like everyone just understood where I was coming from, my hesitation and my need.

‘Yea, I will do it ra!’ said Sai Thej.

I was relieved. Asking for help never seemed so difficult!

The next morning, I was a little anxious but was very hopeful that the ticket would get booked. And luck seemed to be with me, the ticket was booked. Sai Thej confirmed. I was so relieved that I didn’t even check the message I received on my phone. I just needed to hear that the ticket was booked.

Without stressing out too much about the return journey now, I had a good time with everyone around and we returned to Hyderabad that evening. Went home, spent some time with mom, showed the ‘NIT Warangal graduation degree certificate’ and talked about stuff in general, had dinner and slept.

Monday had arrived, my train was at 6 PM. I packed my luggage, the dinner box my mom prepared and some ironed white dresses.

As usual, I started not too early and not too late. It was just about the right time! I reached the railway station and noticed that the train was already on the platform. I walked down the staircase to the platform and realised that I hadn’t checked my seat number! I quickly took out my phone, searched for messages from IRCTC in a hurry and found a message sent in the evening. ‘Chart prepared’ it read. I opened it and just couldn’t believe my eyes.

The message read ‘B3 27’. It took a moment for me to process it. I had always received messages which read something like ‘S7 34’. This was different. And then, after a few moments passed, it struck me. ‘That rascal had booked an AC ticket for me!’ I came to a standstill, almost about to cry… but then I smiled, and nodded my head.

I think I never thanked him for that, maybe it was never required.

The tale of an extraordinary birthday

You know the drill. Fast forward a few more years, enter the startup life.

The years 2015 and 2016 were some of the most challenging years of my life. We were working on our startup ‘WhatsDplan’ at that time, and things were distraught. Though very gruelling at that time, I cherish them the most! This incident is one during that horrid period.

We were two of us working full-time along with a few others helping us out in building the startup. We had spent a good amount of time in 2015 and were reaching the end of 2016 without any significant result. Every day felt new. There was always something new to look forward to — either good or bad. And I particularly didn’t mind either! It was such a state. There were no festivals, no holidays, no personal vacations or breaks of any sort. We were just under sheer grind, all the time, day-in and day-out.

As we were approaching the last quarter of 2016, it occurred to me that my birthday was around the corner. With so many things happening around the startup which required our complete attention, we couldn’t care less about our birthdays! But we did celebrate a little, on Ramesh’s and Anoop’s (my friends from NITW, who were part of the startup) — we cut a cake and had some casual fun, more like a distraction and a formality.

However, that year, my mom asked me to come home for the birthday — she too was concerned that I was stressed out a lot and wanted me to have some break. That year, in 2016, my birthday was on a Monday. I thought I’ll go home on Sunday evening and return to the room (we were working out of a small rented apartment in Kukatpally) on Monday evening.

I knew there would be some celebration at home. They too wanted to cheer me up. Like every birthday, mom made nice sumptuous meals and invited a few relatives and some neighbours for dinner. Just like many middle-class families, we too did not have a ‘gifting culture’ and birthday celebrations at home were not very fancy either.

Though I was not excited much, I was relieved a bit from the startup grind. I tried to enjoy as much as I could, knowing I had to get back to the grind the next day. Some people enquired about the startup, I gave an occasional and vague reply as I too didn’t quite have a very clear answer to most of the questions.

As the evening approached we cut the cake and had our dinner. And I was then getting ready to leave. As I was packing my bag, dad came to me and took out a small box wrapped in paper from his pocket.

My dad had never gifted me anything. Never. Ours was more of a strict father-son relationship and we too were not very particular about gifts. So when my dad handed me the box, it felt different. It felt special.

Standing there, I wondered, ‘of all these years, why’s dad giving me a gift now? Is it because he wanted to remind that he was there for support during the turbulent times of the startup or is that because he felt irresponsible for never giving any gift before!’ A flurry of thoughts just hit me. I tried to gather myself again.

‘Oh! A gift this time!’ I said with a surprised look on my face, yet trying to keep it casual and took the gift from his hand. He was excited and asked me to open it.

‘Is it a pen?’ I asked.

‘Yes, yes. Open it!’ he rushed.

As I opened it, I saw that it was a regular pen. Blue ink. Not too heavy like other branded pens, reserved for gifting. It was simple, nice, and dark. I lifted my hand as if trying to write in the air, clicked it a couple of times, made a nice tick-tock sound and smiled as my dad was standing there looking at my mannerisms. I looked at him and thanked him.

‘You know, there’s something special about this pen’, he sounded like he was revealing a secret to me.

‘Oh, is it?’ I questioned.

He took the pen from my hand, twisted the top part and pulled it away. The pen had changed its shape now. I was like, ‘well, what is it!’

He stretched for my palm, stamped on it with the pulled away part and started smiling.

I looked at my palm and noticed my name printed. ‘Harish Arjun’ it said, in nice, bold, calligraphy font. I couldn’t help but blurted out a burst of loud laughter!

‘So, I can stamp my name now?’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes! You just need to stamp and put your signature now. No need of writing your name, you see,’ he said gleaming with joy.

I just nodded in agreement.

‘Ok, then. I need to leave now,’ I said, ‘nice gift!’ And put the pen inside the box again.

I grabbed my laptop, put it in the bag. Wore the bag around my shoulders, waved at my parents and left.

With my right hand holding the bag strip around the shoulder, I was still holding the pen in my left hand. As I walked towards the bus stop, I kept smiling and nodding at the same time. It was late in the night and the bus wasn’t crowded. I entered the bus and was lucky to get a seat near the back window. With the bag on my lap now, I kept staring at the pen in my hand and smiled all the way from Rasool Pura to Kukatpally. Smiled in wonder and awe!

I smiled, and the smile was not just on my face this time.

More stories to be continued…

Cognitive Biases - Part 07: Belief Bias

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 21:03:07 +0530

👋🏼👋🏼 Hello! Thank you for stopping by.

😀 Please note that this is the seventh in a series of articles I am writing on Cognitive Biases. If you haven’t read the other six yet, I’d recommend you read them first. Links below:

Let’s get started with this one!

Introduction

Let’s go back to the 1600s for a while and explore a couple of the discoveries back then!

Experiment from the Leaning Tower of Pisa

You would have heard of Galileo Galilei. If not, he is the one known for his famous experiment of dropping two objects of different weights from the ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa’. His experiment contradicted what Aristotle had taught before: heavier objects fall faster than the lighter objects. And as the experiment reveals, both the objects hit the ground almost at the same time, busting the popular belief till then.

Isn’t it very intuitive to think that a lighter object will obviously take more time than a heavier object? We experience this phenomenon daily - if a pen and paper slip away from a table, the pen hits the ground first, isn’t it? It is a fact that the pen hits first, but we do not tend to think beyond the easy evidence. The easy evidence is that pen weighs more than the paper, so we correlate the weight of the object to the time taken.

Unfortunately, that is not true. A few experiments (as Galileo and others had done) would reveal that the shape of the object, the density, the buoyancy and air friction determine the time taken, not the weight per se! And this was quite a revelation back then. Due to these and a lot of other discoveries, Galileo would be called the ‘father of modern physics’ by many later on.

Sun or Earth, which one is the centre?

Let’s look at another work by Galileo that questioned a more popular and widely accepted belief in society - geocentrism (the concept that the earth is at the centre).

The contradicting theory is ‘heliocentrism’. Also known as Copernicanism, derived from the name of renowned mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus who first built mathematical models for theoretical explanations, heliocentrism is the astronomical model in which the Sun is at the centre of the universe and the Earth and other planets revolve around it.

Galileo successfully provided physical evidence to explain this phenomenon, but the then community disregarded his claims and forced him to accept that the Earth only was the centre of the universe. And due to this, in 1633, Galileo was ordered to stand trial, was imprisoned for a few years and was then held on house arrest for the rest of his life!

But why was it so difficult for people to believe this newly proposed way of the planetary system which has some scientific explanation?
You see, in the Catholic world prior to Galileo’s conflict, geocentrism agreed with the literal interpretation of the Bible in several places: Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5, Ecclesiastes 1:5 and all the people subscribed to this view as it has got references in the Bible itself. As the connection was established with the Bible, it was hard to contradict this view.

I would like to highlight two takeaways from the above two anecdotes.

Takeaways

From the leaning tower of Pisa experiment:

A belief could be false no matter how popular or intuitive it is, and it takes rigorous experiments to prove it

From the Galileo’s story:

No matter how scientific an experiment and explanation is for a phenomenon, people will not be ready to change their beliefs. In fact, people will be ready to take extreme measures to safeguard their beliefs than try to find out the truth

What is Galileo doing in an article that is supposed to be on psychology, you wonder?
These two anecdotes are only to convey that our beliefs and belief systems are very difficult to understand, difficult to prove and difficult to change. And thus, a lot of what we say, what we do and what we decide are based on these true or false beliefs, knowingly or unknowingly.

That brings us to what is called a ‘Belief Bias’:\

“We judge an argument’s strength not by how strongly it supports the conclusion but by how plausible the conclusion is in our minds.”

Let’s look at a couple of my personal experiences around this.

The belief dilemma

Lesson from my first startup

My first startup was WhatsDplan (more details about this in my earlier article IKEA effect). We started WhatsDdplan because we believed in the idea. And frankly, this belief is good. Without any belief, you wouldn’t achieve anything great. Belief is needed to do something which otherwise would not have been possible. If you want to conquer the moon you need to first believe it and then only will you be able to experience it. But even for that, you need to have a very good grasp of reality and not be drown in a false sense of belief.

My assessment about ‘WhatsDplan’, if I recollect some of the discussions I have had with a few investors and also with a few of my friends and colleagues, was riveted around belief and belief alone! Rather than a strong argument on ‘why’ exactly would it work, I thought it will work because ‘WE’ were building it and we were good. We were invested in the idea since the beginning and did not want to doubt it even for a little while. We carried on with a lot of vigour and purpose, and did not want to give up.

Unfortunately, the startup ended in a tragedy. We had to shut it down after a year-long effort to make it work. We missed a lot of critical observations and assessments which could have helped us pivot and survive. Well, let’s save that story for another day!

Skewed beliefs of my friend

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend. He has had a troubled past and was still figuring it out - about his life and career. He has tried his hand at a variety of things, but nothing seemed concrete. He hopped from one thing to another after giving it a try for a short while - from analytics to data science to finance to consulting to starting up. He did 100 different things and lacked focus in all.

As we were having a conversation about what could he possibly do next, he said he wanted to pursue UPSC! I was shocked. He believed that he could just do it because he thought so. There was no strong argument for it. All he said was, ‘because I want to do it, I will do it!’ But I knew that this was another whim he was having. As his past suggested, he struggled to keep focus in getting a job as an analyst itself, I knew, he will not have the focus and dedication required to crack UPSC. But he was just driven by the idea of it without having a credible argument!

I couldn’t convince him out of it. I am still wondering how do we make someone realise if they are so driven just by their beliefs!

As I think more about it, I realise that the belief bias is not just seen at a personal level like the above examples. We are exposed to it as a society, as a community and as a global fraternity as well.

Let’s take a look at some examples

The age-old patriarchy

It took me one complete season of Money Heist to realise that patriarchy is ingrained in a lot of things we do on a daily basis. I do not want to go into the details of the heist, but on the face of it, we think we are quite liberal in our thinking and believe that we are not being biased based on gender. But, if we critically assess everything we do on a daily basis, we realise that we have taken so many things for granted:

assuming power
judging based on gender rather than intellect or physical capacity
taking unanimous decisions without any consultation
preconceived roles and responsibilities
entrusting ownership without power
a lot more…

There could be reasons for some of the practices (not the above) that bestow roles for males and females separately in the society, which is good as this furthers our progress as a society. But, many of these practises are simply followed because they are just laid out there, because we have been following them since a long time and for no other reason.

Buying a car gives a good life

I have many friends who believe that having a car gives a good life. Ask them why, and they say ‘a car is needed, no?’ The argument dies at the beginning itself. There could be many reasons how a car improves the lifestyle (if not life) which is fine, but a deeper thought is not given into these when such a purchase is made. It is bought because ‘we need a car, right?’

The silly bad omens

There are many instances in my childhood when we did a few things just because we believed them to be true! Let’s take a look at one such incident.

We are three kids in our family - my brother, sister and I. I vividly remember the incident when we had to go to a nearby relative’s house. We had to attend a function in the night and had to walk to the relative’s place.

‘We should not travel in groups of three’, we heard someone tell us, one of our elders. As we were three of us, we believed that it was not good for us to go. But there was a way around, a hack to bypass this! My sister picked up a stone from the ground, put it in the purse and told we were then good to go. We had ‘stone’ as the fourth member, can you believe it?

Sounds silly, right? It is!

There are more:

Looking into a broken mirror is bad luck. You can judge me, but I am still scared to look into a broken mirror!
A black cat crossing the path is bad luck. Many of you still believe this, right?

More examples

Graduating from an IIT gives a good life
Charity is just donating some money to an NGO
Our religion is superior to the other
My responsibility as a citizen is just to cast my vote

How are our beliefs formed?

Many of our beliefs are formed because of what we see and perceive from the society, the environment and everything happening around us. We ponder on some, question some, but accept many as they are. We develop some form of intuition with things and how to deal with them. We take them for granted on the face of it. As we develop these beliefs, when we encounter a similar situation and respond to it, we consider it to be valid without critically looking at the situation.

Because of social conditioning, we are simply said to follow a few things and believe in a few things because it makes life easy or fits someone’s way of how life should be lived, or what leads to a fulfilling life. It may broadly be true, but is not applicable for everyone, in every situation every time. There will be exceptions and we need to embrace those exceptions, for those exceptions and the ability to tread them with required attention separates the bad from the good, and the good from the great.

As kids, we believe in what our parents say, our teachers say, our elders say and we carry them with ourselves as we grow. But the world changes with time and so does our ability to understand and assess things. What you were told to be true may not hold good at a later point in time. Hence, it is advised to question the premise of the belief(s) or the belief system itself from time to time.

Though intuition is good as it helps us decide faster without wasting our precious time and energy, there is one problem: it may not be right always! So, we need to be aware and cautious of how we are coming to some conclusion. And correct ourselves from time to time.

Though we are required to validate everything, it is practically not possible. Many times, we are forced to learn from others’ experiences. And when learning from others’ experiences, we need to critically question and assess the conclusion before believing in it. And many times we need to place our belief in a person, not the belief itself. You may not be able to critically assess the situation always but at least be cognizant of the fact that something is believed because ‘someone’ you trust said so!

It is hard to critically assess and question the existing set of notions and beliefs - sometimes because we don’t know that our decisions are driven by them and sometimes because we do not want to put ourselves in the struggle of pursuit of truth as we are lazy and afraid! So, it is hard to control our existing belief systems from interfering in our objective decision making. It requires training, a lot of it, just like overcoming any other cognitive bias.

How to avoid this bias?

Here are a few things that you could do to safeguard yourself from this bias.

Look for objective reasons. If you think something is true or something is the best thing to do, look for objective reasons why it could be true. Don’t get carried away by the end result just because that seems plausible or intuitive
Break the end result into smaller measurable chunks that could be objectively assessed. Assessing smaller pieces is easier compared to assessing the whole
List down all the different reasons why the belief could be wrong. And disprove them! Rather than cherishing why it could be right, focus on why it could be ‘wrong’. Until you find all the reasons why it could not be wrong, you do not believe it

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

💬 Also, if you would like to add some of your own personal observations about this bias please leave your comment or feedback below.

How to Land a Product Manager Job?

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 13:39:38 +0530

In 2019, I was in Sales at Treebo, taking care of a couple of regions in the South. While this role was good, I felt I had a strong passion for problem solving and building products. Though I had a desire to move into Product, neither did I have enough courage to make the move nor did I have interest to start preparing for a new role altogether. I knew, I got complacent.

And then it happened. Sighting funding reasons, Treebo laid off about 200 of its employees, and I was one of them. I got lucky, I should say! Though it was a bit of a shocker for me, it was a blessing in disguise… That finally let me try my hand at Product.

And as a I moved from Sales to Product, the transition was anything but easy.

Landing a PM interview itself was a big hurdle, leave alone getting selected. Nevertheless, with the right attitude and approach to becoming a Product Manager, I was able to make it. It took me about two months to land an interview and a good four months to get selected at Edureka, my first company as a Product Manager.

If you too are aspiring to become a Product Manager and are a little lost about how to crack it, below are a few resources you could start with. If I was able to transition from a Sales role to a Product role, you can too!

Remember, landing a Product role is not easy. Different companies have different definition of a Product Manager and the expectations and requirements too are different from company to company.

I hope this article gives you some direction on how to proceed and know what are the basic things every Product Manager should do, no matter which company.

Books to Read

There are many Product Manager preparatory books out there. Below are a few which I read and found them very useful as a beginner!

Decode and Conquer by Lewis C Lin
The Product Manager Interview by Lewis C Lin
Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle Laakmann and Jackie Bavaro
Hooked by Nir Eyal
Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Sample Resume and Cover Letter

I would recommend a one-page resume. You can trim your resume by removing all the points which do not add credibility to your profile or amplify your PM skillsets, like your drawing competition award in Grade I!

When mentioning previous work experience, do not write lengthy paragraphs. Just mention the key achievements, key results, key metrics you were able to move.

My resume for your reference: Arjun’s Resume

I have used Novoresume to create mine. It is quite handy. Check it here
Use my resume as a template. There is no hard and fast rule that your resume should be like mine. This resume is for you to draw some inspiration and tweak yours to create the best version to showcase yourself.

My sample cover letter: Cover Letter

Not all companies ask for a cover letter, but having one could be very handy when sending a detailed application on email or when filling up a registration form on a new job portal

Case Studies and Assignments

Assignments form an important criteria for selection in many companies (especially startups). They help the recruiters guage the potential of the candidate without wasting much of their time.

A good assignment could come a long way in not just clearing the round but also in earning brownie points in case the interview doesn’t go very well!

A few assignments which I did for some of the companies I applied for:

PM Interview Questions

Some sample PM Interview questions:

PM Preparation Courses

Some courses which understand your exact need and guide you in the right direction:

PM Interview Prep

Product Communities to join

Product Communities were the best thing that happened to me in my entire journey. They were my saviour. The folks in these communities help each other and the overall guidance and support you get is priceless. From helping you get started with your first interview to brainstorming a complex feature building exercise, you will get everything here.

I would recommend you join them immediately, if you haven’t joined yet!

Here are a few communities I am part of (on Slack). And the best thing… They are FREE!

Other Online Product Resources

Some online blogs and YouTube channels have especially been very helpful in preparing the dreadful Product Design, Product Improvement and Product Strategy questions.

Here are a few you MUST check-out:

All My Resources

You can find all the resources here: Arjun’s PM Interview Resources

All these resources may not be completely sufficient to crack the elusive Product Manager role, do not worry… Keep at it, you will make it!

And do not hesitate to reach out to me if you need further guidance: LinkedIn

🙏🏼 Thank you for reading!

👍🏼 Hope you found this useful. If you think this could help any other aspiring Product Manager, do share it with them too!

💬 Also, if you need my help with anything else, do leave your comment below!

…Continue to my blog to read more articles

Cognitive Biases - Part 06: Forer Effect

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:04:18 +0530

👋🏼 Hello! Thank you for stopping by.

😀 Please note that this is the sixth in a series of articles I am writing on Cognitive Biases. If you haven’t read the other five yet, I’d recommend you read them first. Links below:

What is the Forer effect?

We easily attribute our personalities to vague statements, even if they apply to a wide range of people.

In 1948, psychologist Bertram R. Forer conducted an experiment on his students where each student was given a set of statements (about themselves) like:

“Although you do have some weaknesses, you try very hard to overcome them and be a better person.”
“You are an independent thinker who takes pride in doing things differently than others.”
“You have an intense desire to get people to accept and like you.”
“Sometimes you give too much effort on projects that don’t work out.”

The students were then asked to rate how accurately those statements described themselves on a scale of 5. What was surprising was, though the statements were very generic, the average rating of all the students was 4.3/5 which indicated that the students found those statements highly relevant to themselves! Based on the results, Forer declared the presence of this effect where people tend to accept positive sweeping generic statements about themselves as though those statements are solely made for them.

This is also called as the Barnum effect. named after P. T. Barum who declared that ‘a sucker is born every minute’ — meaning people are gullible and want to believe what they are told, so they think that general statements are solely about themselves. This effect is also less commonly called the ‘Barnum-Forer effect.’

Let me explain how this translates into our everyday life, the products we use, and the things we do on a daily basis.

As always, some personal story.

Shaadi kab hai?

It is that time in my life (or am I way past that time!) when everybody around me keeps asking, ‘when’s your marriage?’ And being such a bore that I am, I do not have a girlfriend and to add to that, there is a pandemic going on with lockdown imposed everywhere and palpable distress all around. I have had my share of difficulties in finding the ONE.

Enter the new age of online dating and online matrimony. The online dating and matrimony Apps would come to my rescue, or so I thought! Where do I start? Ummm… This subject is so delicate that it is super easy to get scammed. I mean it. Of all the myriad features these Apps have, around filters, pricing, preferences, interests etc, I would like to talk about the king of all — the ‘Matches for you’ feature. The ‘matches for you’ feature is supposed to recommend the most suitable ‘match’ for you. It is, however, irritating that they do not.

I mean, neither were those matches relevant nor do they make any sense! When I started, the suggestions were super random, highly irrelevant. I was hoping they would get better with my profile, all my details, and my usage. It was only over time that I got convinced that they were not going to get any better!

They use a simple make-believe tactic… that the suggestions are actually tailored for me by presenting them that way. In reality, they are not tailored! The recommendations are made universally applicable to all those who even sparsely have some of my traits. I too believed that those recommendations were really for me for a few days until I realised they were not. And now, I don’t bother much, you see. Reality has dawned upon me and I am still waiting for that miracle to happen… Where Arjuna finally meets his Subhadra. Ahem!

Well, now, whenever I see, ‘Recommended for you’ (not just in the matrimony Apps but also in all the other Apps I use: YouTube, Swiggy, Cure.fit, Netflix etc) — I immediately question whether if they are actually relevant for me or if they are simply imposed upon me. Rather than taking the suggestions for granted, I try to take a moment to pause think through and proceed. This pausing and taking a moment takes effort, a lot of effort. Multiply this with the number of times we come across these situations… it’s unimaginable! We need to consciously train our mind to do so, which we don’t!

You see, companies impose something on us because it might bring more value to them that way; doing it that way might be in their self-interest and not yours always. Being a Product Manager myself, I subscribe to the fact that users interests should always be at the forefront. Unfortunately, that is not how things are run always. Ethical product building should take precedence over profit-making, morally. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality. Simply put, you are the buyer — you must be beware!

Let’s look at another more familiar and relatable example.

The case of horoscopes and jyothishis (astrologers)

My brother gets super excited when he reads the daily horoscope predictions in The Times of India newspaper. I can bet that his excitement wouldn’t subside even by a bit if the TOI swapped the ‘Aries’ prediction with the ‘Saggitarius’ one. The statements which are written are so generic that a street hawker would find the same relevance to them as the CEO sitting in a high-end corporate office.

The same is the case with most of the jyothishis! Don’t believe me? Let me tell you another of my personal stories.

It was during my Engineering days, in the year 2007. I had done extremely well in the AIEEE that year. The word was out and some of my relatives did see me as if I was some alien and I was basking in all the glory, I mean, why not! I had gone to my cousin’s place during those holidays to cherish even more. We were watching TV when a jyothishi came to visit us. I didn’t realise what was happening. After the elders exchanged some words, the jyothishi smiled at me and briskly walked towards me. Took my palm into his, and said things (which make me laugh even today) like, ‘very bright future, very good boy. Nice. Will go abroad soon. The family will become proud. Keep it up, beta’. It’s been 14 years and I am still waiting for Hyderabad to be declared as a new country.

The jyothishi’s statements were so vague and generic that it was ironic how such clear, simple, and direct statements did not make any sense at all! The saddest part, however, was that my sister and mom bought into them!

I am not trying to generalise all the astrologers here. Maybe some predict well, maybe some don’t. I am just stating how gullible we people are to statements even though they are very generic and universally applicable.

More examples

Another online product where the Forer effect is used brilliantly which created quite some craze among the users is the ‘Know your personality’ game on the Facebook feed. I have seen people share things like ‘You are loyal’, ‘You are good at heart’, ‘You make others smile’, ‘You are like a tiger, ferocious yet caring for your family’ on their feed and as WhatsApp statuses! In fact, I have had conversations with some of them and was surprised by their conviction about their personality based on the results from these games, in spite of these statements being ridiculously generic!

The problem is not when some positive reinforcement happens. Positive reinforcement is good, though ethically questionable and factually incorrect. The problem arises when people attribute themselves to a false sense of reality or when some negative reinforcement happens. And we being humans, succumb to such instances as we do not want to trouble ourselves. When someone starts to believe in something because someone said so without pondering over the correctness of it or putting in an effort to validate if such a thing is true or not is when the trouble begins.

There are many other situations where this happens:

Tried the weighing machine at the bus station or the railway station? The weight card has a ‘personal message’ for you! (no it doesn’t)
Received a personal email from the CEO of a company? Hmmm… Looks like the CEO really cares for you! (not really)
A salesperson told you he took a high-level approval to give you the discount? Maybe you should buy the product right away! (please, don’t)
Being born in April do you get excited by reading, ‘Legends are born in April’? You probably are a legend, you should get that tattooed! (oh, no! don’t do it)
A news article says that Indians are good at math. You get 30 out of 100 in the class test and yet you feel proud. I guess you should! (no, please!)
Received a ‘only for you’ 40% discount notification on Heytm? Maybe they love you more than every other user! (they don’t!)

Conclusion

It is true that companies these days use data to create personalization. However, it is extremely difficult to tailor things for you and most of the online products (Netflix, Spotify, Swiggy, Twitter and the like) still have a lot of catching up to do. And till that catching up is done, these companies will present generalization in the disguise of personalization.

So, whenever someone says that something is exclusively recommended for you, remember that it most probably is not! And whenever you come across generic statements about yourself, just smile and move along, you are better than those generic statements… only you need to question and find out yourself!

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

💬 Also, please leave your comment or feedback below.

Cognitive Biases - Part 05: Framing Effect

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 23:41:24 +0530

👋🏼 Hello! Thank you for stopping by.

😀 Please note that this is the fifth in a series of articles I am writing on Cognitive Biases. If you haven’t read the other four yet, I’d recommend you read them first. Links below:

Ok, let’s get started with this one.

Dwapar Yug, Dronacharya and the elephant

Mahabharata, the epic tale between the two groups of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, is a tale of a multitude of human desires, emotions and grit and vengeance. Many of its learnings are used in management, leadership and growth. Let’s start with one such small chronicle from this hell of a tale.

Without going into details, let me try and drive the point.

It is the time of the Kurukshetra War. After the death of Bheeshmacharya, Dronacharya becomes the commander-in-chief of the Kaurava army. Krishna knew that Dronacharya was formidable and with him in charge, it was impossible to defeat the Kauravas.

The only way to remove Dronacharya was to convince him that his son, Ashwathama, was dead. With his son gone, Dronacharya would give up and he could only then be killed. Krishna, the greatest trickster, devises a plan.

Ashwathama, who was considered one of the greatest warriors, was not easy to kill. Hence the trick!

As per Krishna’s plan, Bheema kills an elephant named Ashwathama after which Yudhisthir declares, ‘Ashwathama hatha (loudly), iti narova kunjarova (whispers)’. Dronacharya who heard this was able to gather only the first half of the sentence, and with Yudhisthir, who was the epitome of Dharma (righteousness), declaring such an event, Dronacharya believed it to be true and gave up himself in the war field, and was then taken down!

This, for me, is a classic case of the framing effect. Dronacharya placed enormous trust in Yudhisthir and believed that Yudhisthir would never make a false statement and when Yudhisthir called out that Ashwathama was dead, he instantaneously believed it. In fact, Yudhisthir did not make any false statement either, did he? It was just presented in a way that seemed so. It was cleverly designed (by Krishna) to ensure that it was interpreted in the way it was intended to.

That is how the framing effect works. It is not the information, but the way it is presented that does the trick. The trick here is to ‘frame’ someone.

This sounds too pre-historic, eh? Worry not, from the Dwapar Yug to the Kali Yug, the framing effect shines bright.

Kali Yug and the age of (mis)information

Look at some statements below.

India has vaccinated only 3.1% of its population, a meagre number compared to the 41% vaccination rate in the US
The number of vaccine doses given in India stands at 20.7Cr, a whopping 61% of the US population!

Or read how some similar yet strikingly different headlines would create extreme views in a readers mind:

A staggering 20% of the Indian population is still reeling under the below poverty line (BPL)
Positive signs for India as the population under BPL has seen a gradual decline from 40% in 2004 to 20% in 2015

India continues its slump at the Olympics. Wins only 1 bronze
India creates history. Karnam Malleswari becomes the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal

Out of 4, India is the worst team
Indian team is the 4th best team in the world!

Interesting examples, but sound too far-fetched. How do they relate to me, hmmm?
Hold on!

Do you go well with memes?

Seems familiar? Been in that situation? I’d bet you did!

The classic tale of discount marketing

You are drawn to the discount ‘%’ more than the price itself. The discount % is perceived as saving, as a benefit. And the mind is tricked into believing that you are actually in for a good deal. A 50% off deal cannot be bad, right?

This trick is used in a myriad number of ways. Let’s see.

A shoe store displays 40% off. You get lured, you enter the store and try different shoes. However, you notice that the 40% off is only on a few shoes displayed at the corner, as part of the clearance sale, not on all the shoes. But having entered the store already you are reluctant to leave now. And inside the store, the sales agents are ready to entice you more, serve you more and make you feel like their hero. And you try more shoes. The chances are you end up buying a different shoe than what you anticipated when you entered. Happened with you?

Another example

Two ice-cream boxes containing the same ingredients display their contents differently. The first box says ‘10% fat’, the second box says ‘90% fat-free!’. It is highly likely that, given a chance, you would choose the second box more often than the first one.

Other variants of the discount displays include ‘up to 60% off’, ’50% off, offer ends tonight’, ’20% cashback’, ’60% off up to ₹50’ (this is the most ridiculous of all). They all make you feel bad for NOT using them; you may not realise that, but they do! And you want to avoid this ‘bad’ feeling and allow ourselves to be ‘framed’.

Framing Effect

We often draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how it is presented.

The framing effect perhaps is one of the most common tricks used by marketers, politicians, news agencies, influencers and not to forget — magicians. As the name itself says, it ‘frames’ the audience into believing what they see (or hear as it was in Dronacharya’s case), depending on how the information is presented. And based on the way information is presented, we draw different conclusions from it — to support a party or not, to buy a shoe or not, to trust a person or not — we do it almost all the time. You could draw a completely wrong conclusion and only realise it much later or not realise it at all! You could have drawn an entirely different conclusion had the information been presented in any different way.

Politicians and the art of framing

Some more examples 😀

The government will glorify the fact that it was able to pave way for a cashless economy due to demonetization but will hide the fact that the currency in circulation, according to the RBI data, was ₹24.2 lakh crore in 2020 compared to ₹16.4 lakh crore in 2016. And also cover it under the rugs that as per the RBI data, about 99% of the invalidated money was returned to the banks. Remember flushing out black money was a prime objective of demonetization? But the government will never bring them to light themselves.
The government will call for caution, solidarity and brotherhood among fellow people during these tough Covid times, but will underplay misgovernance and systemic failure at the topmost level.

I can go on and on with various examples about how clever our people are in framing things and playing it so subtly that you don’t even realise.

What am I trying to say, anyway?

Anyway, coming to the point. The information you consume, from the people you know, from advertisements, from strangers on social media, from newspapers or any other media — they all bear a very high power to influence us. It can sway us away from one view to another extreme view, merely by the way information is presented.

People tend to present information that suits their narrative, in a way that doesn’t harm them but helps them. It is natural. It stems from the need for self-protection and preservation. People don’t give away their shortcomings as easily as they glorify their virtues.

In fact, the onus of identifying the shortcomings (or all the facts) is on the other person. This is prevalent in almost everything you do — purchasing a car, downloading an App, ordering food, looking for a match on matrimony, voting in an election, selecting an insurance plan — the list is endless.

In fact, ‘Caveat Emptor’, a Latin phrase, which can be loosely translated into English as ‘let the buyers beware’ is a law in commercial transactions. It places the onus on the buyer to perform due diligence before making a purchase and doesn’t necessarily hold the seller responsible for not disclosing everything — for a simple reason that it is impossible to state ‘everything’ about a product/service. For example, if you want to buy a car from me, I may NOT be able to give the entire history of the car, if it had any accident, how many times was the car taken for servicing, if the windshield is in perfect condition etc. It is your responsibility to check everything that you need to know before you make the payment. By law, the onus is on you while making a purchase.

And this rule, if not law, can be extended beyond commercial transactions. While consuming information, the onus is on the receiver to get the complete information. There always will be grey areas in the information presented and you need to be careful while you draw conclusions from the information presented as it is.

This happens all the time — from making new friends to planning a trip, from finding a partner to buying a new house, from choosing a college to starting a company. It is better to take a step back and look at the information from an objective eye by asking more questions and asking for more information. This is difficult and cannot be done all the time. But if not paid enough attention, this could take you for a ride.

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

💬 Also, please leave your comment or feedback below.

Cognitive Biases - Part 04: Availability Heuristic

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 23:22:49 +0530

👋🏼 Hello! Thank you for stopping by!

😀 Please note that this is the fourth in a series of articles I am writing on Cognitive Biases. If you haven’t read the other three yet, I’d recommend you read them first. Links below:

Let’s get started with this one.

The geyser story

Last year, we moved into our newly built house in Hyderabad. Nothing fancy, just a decent one with a few more comforts compared to the old house. For one, the new house had a facility for geyser whereas the old one didn’t.

One of my school friends, Naresh, visited us when we were getting the geysers fitted. We had ordered Havells geysers from Amazon. They seemed fine, the power rating, the warranty, the make of the product and the price — they fit our requirement.

What amazed me was what happened after that. When Naresh wanted to buy geysers for his home, he too ordered the ‘Havells geysers from Amazon’. They performed well and were energy efficient, after all, and it made sense to order the same product he thought. All he did was, he searched for Havells geysers on Amazon, placed the order and they got delivered. Only, there was one problem — the geyser did not fit the height in his bathroom! He did not check that, the geyser did not fit his requirements. And he had to replace it!

So, what happened here? Naresh was presented with a similar situation as I. He just reproduced what I did as if it was the natural thing to do. In fact, it sounds fairly simple too — When I wanted to have a geyser, I ordered a Havells from Amazon and when Naresh wanted to have a geyser, he too ordered a Havells from Amazon, because it worked for me. He took my geyser as an example and applied it in his judgement!

I realised, when we are in a situation where we are supposed to decide if something works or not, we most often think of the situations in the past and identify what had worked already and reproduce the same. Seems like a fully scientific approach, right? We are using historic data to predict what needs to be done in the future. However, there is one catch. A big one.

You see, we, humans, are not computers. Our ability to recollect data and information and process it is limited. We do not see the entire context as clearly. Our natural tendency is to process only that information that is very vivid in our mind. And whatever is vivid doesn’t necessarily mean that it is sufficient and that could lead to some potential errors. So, it requires quite an additional effort to actually process the information in its entirety to avoid errors. But, as you know, our brain is lazy to do that.

Speaking in statistical terms, the sample size or the number of data points we could recollect and process at a time is very minimal. Though the capacity of our brain is unbelievably large, it is just not a natural thing for us to process such larger portions in a very short span of time. Because our life demands us to make decisions all the time, we tend to use the references which are very fresh in our memory to arrive at decisions rather quickly. And if we make the decisions based on the ‘notions’ derived from such a small sample (of memories), we are prone to what is called a Type II error in statistics. It means that due to the small sample size, we conclude that our hypothesis is true, when, in fact, the hypothesis is not true. That means, if we are given a larger number of samples (memories), we would have arrived at a different conclusion, after all.

In the behavioural sciences world, the phenomenon of arriving at conclusions based on the examples we can immediately recollect is called the ‘Availability Heuristic.’

Availability Heuristic

We rely on immediate examples that come to our mind while making judgements.

The Shawshank Redemption

Sometime back, a group of our friends went for a drive outside of the city. There were a bunch of people whom I met for the first time and made some new friends too. As I was discussing with a girl, she asked me to suggest some good movies to watch. Without any further questions or thoughts, I started to blurt out my favourite movie names, movies which I felt were good — the typical must-watch list — which included The Shawshank Redemption, Shutter Island, The Schindler’s List, The Godfather, some of Nolan’s, and some newly released movies on Netflix and Prime.

Little did I try to actually find out what her interests were or what she liked to watch before suggesting anything! And as it turned out, she watched The Shawshank Redemption and did not find it as compelling as I thought it would! I couldn’t understand why would someone not like such a beautiful movie!

What I did there — which, I think, most of you also do — was resorting to a list of movies which I had in my mind, ready as examples to be given to anyone who wanted to watch a movie. The examples were ready, they only needed an avenue to come out and these movies had to be good for everybody, I thought. I was wrong.

Wondering why I am making such a fuss about just watching a movie?

Allow me, I am trying to arrive at something here, will you?

Some other examples

You are chilling out with your friends. After a week full of busy office work, you finally get to relax! If a discussion comes up whether it is the government’s failure to control Covid or if it was people’s negligence — which side would you take and whom do you blame? I am sure you won’t do a root cause analysis to arrive at this conclusion. Some would probably quote a few instances where the government was absolutely foolish and some would say that the public behaved irresponsibly and brought it on to themselves. Or some argue for both sides.

In any case, all these discussions are drawn from the examples you and your friends can recollect. But, how good are those examples to actually validate the blame? They are too subjective to even compare and say that one stands way over the above, but our mind forms some heuristics to do this comparison. It somehow can reduce this hugely complex problem to a set of a few examples, and you don’t realise that. You don’t realise that your notions and conclusions can be grossly inaccurate.

When posed with a situation of ‘why is India not doing well?’, you tend to recollect examples of superficial things, like the population, literacy, pollution, unemployment among others which are very clear in your memory, of which you have an example or two to present as an argument to validate your views. But you don’t realise that these are not sufficient to establish your argument. These are only the things that are available to your memory, to state as examples. They are not sufficient.

More examples

You are not promoting a deserving candidate— ‘When I had an interaction with her last time, she seemed very immature.’
Which restaurant to go to for dinner? — ‘Where did we go last time?’
What food to order? — ‘What did we order last time, either order the same thing or order anything other than that?’
Want to buy a new hair straightener? — ‘Which brand’s Ad did I see recently?’
Feeling lazy to choose what to wear to the office? — ‘Which dress gave me good compliments from a bunch of people?’
Is he a good guy? — ‘What did my friend tell me about him?’
Is this investment worth it? — ‘Did it work for others I know?’

So, what’s the problem with this, anyway?

Wouldn’t you curse Netflix if it only shows you video recommendations based on just the recent browsing history and not considering all your older watch history? Wouldn’t that be irritating? Wouldn’t you be annoyed at how lame the recommendations are? What you like to watch cannot just be based on one day’s activity, right?

Similarly, just like how Netflix’s recommendation system works, you too should not judge anything or anyone based on one or two examples that come to your mind.

Let’s look at a few more examples that can take a hit on your pocket straight away. Maybe, then you’d realise the importance ;)

It was the August of 2020. If you follow the world of commodities, you would know that the gold prices hit an all-time high! Many of my friends had bought gold; gold seemed to be a good investment, after all. However, one friend, unfortunately, saw this trend. He badly wanted to invest his money and even asked me for better ways of investment — I couldn’t help as I am no good — So, when he saw that others already made good profits from gold, he wanted to do just that! He bought ₹2,00,000 worth of gold at a whopping ₹5,600/gram! That’s it… Bam! As you must be guessing, the prices fell from there… He lost ₹20,000 in one day and is still hoping the price to climb up. But hey, the current price is nowhere near that point!

Oh, wait! This happened pretty recently too… Does Doge strike a chord?

Just because you have vivid examples of others who made profits from a particular investment, you cannot judge that it is going to be good for you too, right? By looking at an example just as an example without the constraints and the context it is operating in, you cannot make a correct judgement.

They say, information is wealth, but ensure that you have the complete information, not just a few examples to suit your narration.

Hmm. Gotcha.

Why do we have this bias, anyway?

All cognitive biases are based on the fact that our brain is lazy and doesn’t want to do any work unless necessary. That it wants to waste as few resources as possible and consume lesser and lesser energy. And use it only when needed, in the best possible way. However, for the brain to take the best possible way and use the resources in an efficient way we have to train it! But we don’t do that very often, do we?

Whenever there is a need to process information, the mind looks for the easiest possible way to do it. Of the many ways and shortcuts which the mind takes — I discussed a few of these in my previous articles Confirmation Bias and IKEA effect — finding a similar example for comparison is probably more qualified yet an easier option.

When you judge someone or something, you automatically scan for a benchmark — a benchmark in that category or in that field or in that country or in that region or the community or in that era. Anything that could be used to form some notion about whether this someone or something is good in comparison with the immediate examples that occur to you, that you could recollect.

But that’s not how judgements are supposed to be made — read my article on Fundamental Attribution Error where I talk about how judgements should usually be made.

So, how to avoid falling into these pitfalls?

Try and avoid getting into ‘urgent’ situations. Give your mind enough time and resources to take a calculated decision. This could be done by avoiding getting into ‘urgent’ situations as much as possible.
Do research. When you know that you just have one example which you are using to conclude, look out for more examples. Look out for more data points. Look out for more evidence. Do not decide straight off the bat.
Discuss and deliberate. Many times we do not know whether it came from one example or multiple data points. We do not know whether our choice is the best one or not. It is safe to discuss and deliberate on your choices with others whom you trust.

Have any other suggestions to avoid these pitfalls? Please comment them below.

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

💬 Also, please leave your comment or feedback below.

Cognitive Biases - Part 03: Ikea effect

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 22:54:56 +0530

👋🏼 Hello! Thank you for stopping by.

😀 Please note that this is the third in a series of articles I am writing on Cognitive Biases. If you haven’t read the other two yet, I’d recommend you read them first. Links below:

Confirmation Bias ✅
Fundamental Attribution Error ✅

Ok, let’s get started with this one.

🚀 WhatsDplan

In 2015, Ramesh Kumar Katreddi and I started WhatsDplan. We had deliberated quite a lot on the product we wanted to build and out of the numerous ideas we had, we narrowed it down to one and started building it. We had quit our jobs and laboured day and night to build the best product we could.

We were building an event planning application for friends. We loved the idea from the beginning and we thought that the product we were building would be loved by everyone around, used by many and would be an instant hit. As naive as it may sound, I did think that WhatsDplan was a breakthrough product! I mean why would anyone not like such a beautiful product, right!

As it turned out, I was wrong. People did not use it as much as I thought they would. In fact, people did not use it at all! There were hardly any repeat users and the number of users dipped day by day. I was gutted and there was nothing I could do about it. My heart sank and I felt devastated. I still hoped that something miraculous would happen for people to realise its value. And, of course, nothing miraculous happened!

We started working on the App idea because we loved it and put our heart, blood and sweat into developing it. If you ask any startup founder you will get the same answer. But, does that mean that others also would value our product as much as we do? Most of the time, the answer is no. It was only much later that I realised that our App did not provide much value to the users and they did not like it as much as we did.

I realised that for the things I create, people do not assign the same amount of value as I do. In fact, I realised I assign a disproportionately high amount of value to the things that I create, but others don’t.

Not just me, you too are the greatest lover of your work, aren’t you? You too would have a thing or two in your closet that you value a lot, right? A childhood sketch maybe? Or a painting or a hand-written note or the prizes you’d won! Don’t you value them so much? You don’t realise, but you probably value them very highly! More so, if you are an artist, you are likely to value your video or a song or a film or a poem or even a piece of quote/tagline more highly than your friends’ who do similar work!

But why do we attach so much value to things we create? There’s a reason.

🎇 The IKEA effect

The IKEA effect simply says that we place a higher value on things we partially created ourselves.

One of the many Cognitive Biases, the IKEA effect draws its name from the world-famous Swedish furniture company, IKEA.

At IKEA, you don’t always get a fully assembled product. In many cases, you get parts of the furniture in boxes and you assemble them yourself. And as it happens, because you are assembling your furniture, you assign more value to it and hence are more likely to go back to IKEA again than any other furniture store. Pretty smart, eh!

The word ‘IKEA effect’ was first coined by Michael Nortan, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely in their 2012 paper titled ‘IKEA effect: When labour leads to love.’ The paper opens with a famous ‘instant cake mixes’ story from the 1950s.

Long story short, when the instant cake mixes were introduced into the market, they did not perform well. The sales did not pick up. When the manufacturers studied the reasons for why such a good product was not picking up, they found that the instant cake mixes took away the need to ‘put in the effort’ to make cakes at home. They made the housewives think that it made cooking too easy and they did not value them as much. By removing the need for effort and labour, the cake mixes de-valued themselves instead of improving the value. So, later, when the manufacturers re-launched them by introducing an extra step where the housewives had to add an egg into the mix before baking, they gained popularity and it was a hit!

We, as humans, have the psychological need to feel competent, that we are capable of doing something and can learn and overcome obstacles. We don’t like to be seen as incompetent or foolish. This could be linked to the time when a man’s survival depended on his competence and his ability — to hunt and to safeguard himself and his family. Not just for survival, but also for his status, his power and improving his chances of mating — they all demanded his competency. This is true even to this day.

Another reason why the IKEA effect happens is ‘Effort Justification’. When we work hard for something, we tend to believe that all our effort was for a good reason, that there was a purpose which we were working towards. And no matter what the outcome, we place more value on it because we worked hard for a good reason in the first place. We think we are rational and want to justify that all that time and effort are not mere wastes! So, we convince ourselves that our ‘thing’ is more valuable than others.

When we create something, we not only feel good at the moment, but it also fulfils a deep psychological need. We derive happiness and the feeling of happiness gets etched in our memory. And when we create something, we find it to be more valuable than it is because of this extra dose of happiness it gives us.

📑 Some examples

Think about it, which one would you value more: a greeting card with a long personal note you wrote yourself or a greeting card that has a well-written thank you note by a professional? You likely value the card with your personal message more than the other although the message on the professional card is better in every way — in terms of content, emotions, grammar and presentation!

Another example, if you haven’t already, bake a cake! I bet you’d value it more than the most delicious cake from the best bakery in the world!

Not just in personal lives, it happens at our workplace too. You spend a lot of time in research, deliberate a lot and propose an idea to a problem. You instantly fall in love with the idea — no matter how bad or impractical it is. You think that it is great and is worth giving a shot.

Or you work hard and execute a project to completion. You think that it is worthy of the ‘best project’ award. However, it baffles you when your manager doesn’t give you any recognition!

🤔 Is that wrong?

You might say, of course, you value things more because of your emotional attachment with them because you created them and only you know how hard you worked for it. And this is good. Valuing things is good. Because you value things, you take care of them, you ensure their longevity and nurture them if required. This leads to a more caring, loving and sustainable world — a better place to live, after all!

However, if your biased decision-making affects others’ lives then there is a problem. This cannot be ignored. That would not make the world just. As a society, we need to consider others’ interests as well to make it a better place.

📑More examples

Consider an example, a politician is adamant about not revoking a policy just because he spent many months creating it although the policy is irrelevant in the present day and is affecting millions of people. Or your manager who doesn’t change an existing process because she had spent innumerable hours devising the process a couple of years ago and works just fine even today, or so she thinks! However, it is you and your team who are facing the brunt of it.

Or you work the whole night analysing the market and arrive at some conclusive finding to improve your company revenue. However, in the morning you find some evidence which renders your findings inconclusive. Yet, you go ahead and discuss the actionable based on your analysis from the night.

Or as a manager, when you have an option to choose between your work and your subordinate’s, you disregard the work by your subordinate even though you know deep down that her work is better than yours!

Sounds unfair, right? It is! And we all are party to it, thanks to our lazy and self-obsessed mind.

💎 So, how to avoid this?

I could think of a few ways, you can add more in the comments!

🩺 Take a second opinion
When you are deeply engrossed in your creation you do not realise its disadvantages. You tend to think that all is good and get blindsided. So, it is always good to take a second opinion, run it with others and be open for feedback. In most cases, you are not an expert in the area you are working on, so it is always better to be open to expert opinions and other ideas as well.
For example, if you made a new Sales deck, run it by your colleagues and ask for feedback. Don’t assume that it is the best deck on the planet.

❤️ Think from a third-person’s point of view
Thinking from someone else’s point of view is not easy. It needs a lot of empathy and empathy is not developed overnight. But, with experience and by talking to more and more people you will have it. And once you have it, it is only a question of whether or not you are willing to make that extra effort to put yourself in the other person’s shoe.
For example, if you prepared a plan for your kids for the summer vacation, try and get a grasp of what they think of it. Do they like it too?

🧐 Read the environment And when people do not directly give you the feedback or share how they feel, you need to go out of your way to see how they are responding. Watch out for signs yourself. Do they really like it too or is it just your belief? Is your work affecting them in any adverse way? Is there anything you could do to make things better?
For example, if you launched a new leave policy at the workplace, listen to the chatter around. Listen to what the employees are saying about it. Are there any changes you should do to the policy?

⛔ Be ready to accept failure All your efforts won’t be fruitful. All your creations won’t be great. You must accept that. Most of your works fail. And from failures, you learn. Only when you accept the fact that your work is not great is when you strive to create something remarkable. And when you strive for something truly remarkable — you usually end up doing that!
Eg.: Well, no examples for this one! 😜

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

💬 Also, please leave your comment or feedback below.

Cognitive Biases - Part 02: Fundamental Attribution Error

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 19:55:13 +0530

👋🏼 Hello! Thank you for stopping by.

Please note that this is the second in a series of articles I am writing on Cognitive Biases. If you haven’t read the first article yet, I’d recommend you read that first 😀. Link below:

Confirmation Bias ✅

Fundamental Attribution Error

The Fundamental Attribution Error basically says that we judge others based on their personality and fundamental character, but judge ourselves based on our situation and circumstances.

To explain this, I am going to take a rather filmy route. Please bear with me as I get into quite a few details of these film stories to drive home the point. If you are into movies, you’d enjoy it, I believe. Even otherwise, cut me some slack, would you?

Okay, let’s get started.

Section 375

Let’s look at the story of the movie Section 375. If you have watched it already, you’d be able to relate better, but for others, I’ve tried to lay the plot briefly below to give you enough context.

The movie is a very well written courtroom drama with Tarun Saluja (Akshaye Khanna) as the defence lawyer, Hiral Gandhi (Richa Chadda) as the prosecutor arguing rape charges filed by the victim Anjali Dangle (Meera Chopra) against Rohan Khurana (Rahul Bhatt).

Rohan, a successful Bollywood director and Anjali, a budding costume designer hoping to build a successful career in the industry, get along well in showbiz. Anjali bags a couple of big projects working under Rohan and is optimistic of a bright future.

Their relationship, however, turns into an affair and when things do not turn out well between the two is when the plot thickens. And it is unfortunate and absolutely miserable to see people in influential position misuse their power to personal whims and fancies.

Long story short, one thing leads to another and Rohan (who is already married to Kainaaz Khurana) ends the affair suddenly and withdraws Anjali from all the ongoing projects. From working on a few big projects and making a name for herself in the industry to losing everything instantly, reality hits Anjali hard. She realises this, apologises to Rohan and goes back to him to avoid any further lost opportunities. Taking advantage of his position, Rohan calls her to his residence and yet again, tries to exploit her of the situation, assaults her and forces her into having sex. Anjali couldn’t stand it any further, it was the end of the line for her.

So, as it happens, Anjali files a case against Rohan for rape and sexual assault. She presses charges and gains the media and public support overnight!

The rest of the case is discussed in a highly engaging courtroom drama. One thing I particularly like about this movie is how fine the dialogues are written and how the director, Ajay Bahl, explores a very controversial and uncomfortable territory.

With this backdrop and before discussing the movie any further, let’s look at a few things very objectively.

Is Rohan a nice guy? Absolutely not.
Did Rohan have a history of misbehaviour? Yes.
Did Anjali have an affair with Rohan, knowing he is married? Yes.
Did Anjali have consensual sex with Rohan before the rape incident? Yes.
Does having a bad past make the accused guilty of current charges? No.
Do we have strong proof of rape? Not rape, but marks of physical abuse and sex. And a confession by Anjali.
Did Anjali have a blemishless history to take her word as gospel? No.

So, as you can see — the case stands on a knife’s edge. And in cases like these, the victim’s confession against the accused is sufficient to pronounce him guilty. And the court will decide that based on the facts, the evidence and the victim’s statement, which will be the final judgement and that is fine! And that’s exactly how a judgement is passed — after a thorough and unbiased examination of the facts and evidence, not from hearsay and definitely not because some section of the public thinks so.

So, what has this story got to do with Fundamental Attribution Error, you wonder?

The reason I gave this entire backdrop is to show the relevance and importance of context and facts before a judgement is passed about anything or anyone. And the ‘Fundamental Attribution Error’ I would like to refer to in this story is that made by the media and the public, people like you and me. People like us.

In this case, the defence lawyer, Tarun, was seen by the media and the public as the villain for defending the accused. In fact, even Hiral Gandhi, the prosecutor (who herself was Tarun’s student) was surprised at Tarun’s lack of awareness. She wondered how Tarun was not able to see things that clearly portrayed Rohan guilty and was surprised at how hard he was trying to defend Rohan of rape charges!

The media and public outrage are understandable — they are disgusted with such pathetic behaviour of men across industries, strata, and geographies. But are they right in calling the accused guilty already? Because people knew Rohan’s past and his character, they judged him based on his past and his character than the facts. And they believed it and could have bet their life on it. They believed they were right, no matter what the actual truth was. They knew that Rohan was a sick person, and hence must be the culprit.

But, is that the truth? Did their judgement stand on a strong ground? Were they prone to the fundamental attribution error? I guess so.

As it happens in the end, Anjali confesses to Hiral Gandhi that it was not rape. Anjali couldn’t digest the fact that she got those projects, not because of her talent and skills but because Rohan did her a favour by spending time with him. She felt like a whore, and was hurt. She wanted to take revenge. Cleverly, and with vengeance, she made a case for herself.

I would have stretched the explanation by quite a bit on a very sensitive topic, you think. But let me tell you, it is prevalent in many and very mundane real-life situations as well. But before going there, let me tell you another story.

Chak De! India

Remember Kabir Khan from Chak De! India?

The movie opens with the final between India and Pakistan in the World Hockey Championship. Pakistan is leading 2–1. With 2 minutes to go India desperately need a goal. And luckily for India, they get a penalty shot. It is highly unlikely to not score a goal on a penalty shot. So, all the Indians, the team management, the entire team and the captain Kabir Khan — all are very hopeful of the goal.

Kabir Khan takes the shot and as the drama unfolds, he misses it! India loses the final!

The entire country is disappointed at the loss. The public outrage is palpable. The media accuses Kabir Khan of the loss. With a few pictures of Kabir Khan with the Pakistan players, it questions his patriotism. The question catches heat and in no time the public actually declares him as a traitor. A traitor who gave away the win to Pakistan. Kabir Khan’s neighbourhood disowned him. He and his family were forced to vacate and move to a new place.

But why? How did the public come to that conclusion?

Let’s look at what happened.

Do India-Pakistan matches carry an extra dose of emotions? Hell, yes!
Did India lose the match against Pakistan? Yes, happens in sports.
Was there a possibility that the loss was just circumstantial? Definitely. You can’t control everything that happens in a hockey match!
People were outraged by the loss. Yes, understandable.
The loss was attributed to Kabir Khan. Yes, understandable. He was the captain, after all.
Did Kabir Khan deliberately lose the match? No!
Kabir Khan was a Muslim. This shouldn’t matter, but it did for the public.
Being a Muslim is attributed as favouritism to Pakistan. I guess this is a stretch, but again the public attributed it whatsoever!
Displaying sportsmanship by shaking hands is attributed as anti-national. The public had taken it too far here.

Well, it may seem alright that people were outraged and furious about the loss and this kind of accusation could just have been an outpour of emotions. This, right here, is a Fundamental Attribution Error. When you look at it again, people were strongly carried away by their emotions because of the loss and believed that the loss was only because of Kabir Khan. Unfortunately, in that flurry of emotions, they took it too far, they declared him anti-national on the mere basis that he was a Muslim.

All this filmy Gyan is OK! Does this happen in real life too?

We make this kind of attribution errors in our life too! We jump to conclusions and judge others based on our prior notion, opinion and perception about them. If someone does something, we do not critically assess the situation and pass our judgement based on our preconceived notions in the spur of the moment. Though we think we are very rational, we are driven by emotions most of the time.

Let me give you some examples. Real-ones this time :)

Performance appraisals!

Do you feel that you are not being recognised? That your performance rating and salary hike is not as per your expectations despite working really hard and giving all you got because your boss is an idiot? But your colleague is well promoted and treated nicely because she maintains good terms with her manager despite not being very talented and hard-working as you are?

Do you blame your poor performance on your boss but your colleague’s better rating on her character?

I am not sure about you, but I certainly did. In one of my previous companies, I did not get the hike I expected, I blamed my poor performance on the market and my manager for not recognizing my efforts. I, in fact, was convinced that only those who are in the close network of the manager got the benefits, not all! I blamed my inability to perform on my circumstances and my manager.

Fast forward a few years, I now know that I was wrong! I know that I was naive. That growth requires effort and it can’t just merely be circumstantial. Now I don’t take others’ growth for granted just like mine!

I mean, we wear different lens when we judge others and different (self-fulfilling) lens when we judge ourselves.

I get reminded of this meme, ‘tumhara kutta tommy, hamara kutta kutta?’ — says how self-serving we are, how we judge others to suit our convenience!

We favour our own people and disregard others. If we make some mistake, we blame it on the situation. But if the same mistake is made by others, we somehow know for a fact that it is because of their inability, their personality and their carelessness. We care less about the role of circumstances and situations in the case of others than in our own.

I mean, we are not ready to cut someone some slack because of their past choices and past mistakes. We carry their past all through our life and use it to judge them. And judge them as per our convenience, to fit our narrative.

Sounds strange? Let’s look at some more examples…

If someone fails an entrance exam, you say ‘he’s not capable.’ But, if you fail in the exam, the narrative changes to ‘I had a fever, I couldn’t study.’
If someone is good at sketching, ‘he’s just talented.’ And why don’t you sketch? ‘you know I don’t have time to practice.’
If a colleague takes a leave because he’s sick, you already know he is lying. But when you fall sick and skip work, nobody should blame you.
If someone loses money in stocks, ‘she’s such a bad investor.’ But if you lose money in stocks, ‘the market crashed!’
If someone did not get selected for a job, ‘he was not qualified in the first place.’ But if you did not get selected, ‘the interviewer asked tough questions.’
If someone loses a game, ‘she was unfit, she shouldn’t have been selected.’ But if you lose a business deal, ‘they did not understand the benefits of our product.’

We also pass judgements based on mere appearances and personalities:

A candidate is not well organized and well planned because he is wearing a wrinkled shirt in an interview.
A girl is a slut because she is wearing a skirt.
A girl is inviting you for sex because she is talking to you with a smile.
Someone is lazy just because he is fat.

These judgements might be true in some cases. But they are most certainly NOT true all the time. We form these judgments because our mind is in a rush and our experience says that these are true most of the time.

The world is chaotic and we are trying to figure out our way through all this chaos. It’s like cracking a code or solving a puzzle. It appears very random at first, but as we solve it we see patterns and realise that we can crack the code by following those patterns.

Similarly, in life too, we are trying to find patterns around us — the way people talk, the way they eat, the way they commute, the way they dress, the way they treat others etc. And when we see a pattern, it gets registered in our mind. We use these patterns subsequently to navigate through the chaos and make choices quickly. That, however, doesn’t mean that the patterns hold good all the time. There could be and there will be deviations in the patterns. And in life, we should embrace these deviations.

We must be cognizant of the fact that our judgements could be wrong and think twice before we judge or comment on others.

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

💬 Also, please leave your comment or feedback below.

Cognitive Biases - Part 01: Confirmation Bias

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 23:10:47 +0530

Cognitive Biases

Cognitive Biases are a set of unwritten guidelines that nudge us to make decisions and take actions. They reduce our mental or intellectual effort to process information and make rational choices. We generally follow them without our awareness and in total submission. We follow them as they reduce our cognitive overload.

We, very commonly, fall into the trap of these biases as they are easy to follow, reduce the stress and efforts to decide and take an action. Our brain is wired to process information only when necessary. It wants to off-load as much of its work as possible and go into the ‘chill zone’ as soon and as often as possible. It doesn’t want to be disturbed. It wants to be left alone!

Hence, we form some heuristics with which we process information without troubling the brain very much and very often.

Confirmation Bias

One such heuristic, one such bias, is the Confirmation Bias. Let me give you a situation.

In fact, go through this situation and think about what would you do in such a situation. Don’t lie to yourself — more likely than not, you are biased ;)

Ok, let’s see.

You are part of your school WhatsApp group. The group, which was formed 4 years ago, is moderately active. Members generally post birthday or anniversary wishes, news on current affairs, some memes and jokes.

One fine day, a discussion starts on Football. You don’t watch much Football and are just aware of only a few famous leagues and players. The discussion picks up heat, and some of your friends are madly debating about who is the best: Messi or Ronaldo!

You go away for an hour and when you come back, you see 937 unread messages. You go berserk. Stunned by this madness, you like to figure out who is the best yourself! And you have the greatest resort one can have to aid you in this endeavour, the all-knowing master of the universe: Google!

So, if you had to ask Google to find out who is actually ‘The Best’, what would you type? What would you search for?

Now, pause for a moment and think.

No, really, pause and think. What is the phrase that you’d search in Google?

I am serious. Pause and think!

Ok, did you think? Ready now? Fine.

Before reading further, write the phrase you’d search for in the comments below (or write it down somewhere) so that you have proof and you can lock it down. We will come back to it in a moment.

You can continue reading after you comment. Trust me, it will be fun.

Done commenting?

Ok. Now that you’ve decided what you’d search for, let’s see the possibilities. I have written some possible searches and their results:

is messi better than ronaldo
is ronaldo better than messi
why is messi better than ronaldo
why is ronaldo better than messi
who is better, messi or ronaldo
who is the best between messi and ronaldo
football statistics of messi and ronaldo

Of course, there could be many other combinations, but let us look at these.

Based on the order in which you read those articles, you form some initial opinion about Messi and Ronaldo. You start to subscribe to what you read. And as each subsequent fact reinforces the previously read facts, your belief in it strengthens. Once you read a good number of articles (could just be 2 or 3), you will form a very strong opinion about each player.

Options 1, 2, 3, 4:
Please go through the below Google results carefully…

Clearly, as you can see, these results are already biased towards one player (Messi) than the other! Google filters out articles for you that tend to argue that Messi is better than Ronaldo! And as you read one article after the other, the reinforcement (the confirmation of your beliefs) happens, you tend to subscribe to one school of thought. So, if you search ‘is messi better than ronaldo’, you are more likely to end up in the ‘Messi Clan’ than the ‘Ronaldo Clan’ as you read more articles that favour Messi over Ronaldo.

And once you end up in that clan, you do not question your allegiance at all! Would you? I mean, according to you, you have searched by all fairness and Google is CLEARLY saying that Messi is better than Ronaldo. And you wouldn’t doubt the ‘all-knowing master’, would you? Hence you are right! Or, so you think!

Well, a while ago, you did not have any connection with Football. You do not watch much of Football and do not have much knowledge about the players and probably have a piece of very poor knowledge about what’s happening in the Football world. Yet, here you are, almost convinced that Messi is better than Ronaldo.

Similar will be the search results for options 2, 3, and 4 — and you tend to form a strong opinion on either Messi or Ronaldo based on those articles.

Options 5, 6:
Please read these results carefully now…

On the other hand, searches 5 and 6 are not targeted to either Messi or Ronaldo and they give a set of partially unbiased results. Yet, these results are someone’s opinions about both the players. So, if the author of those articles is partially biased towards any player, that would reflect in the article as well.

Option 7:

The search results for 7 give statistics about the players. They give details about the number of matches, goals, awards, possession time, win % etc. These will help you do an easy number-by-number comparison. However, comparing different kinds of numbers is also not easy. I mean, it is not possible to compare the number of goals to the ball possession time or the number of assists or the number of awards etc. Also, if you know a little about Football, you will know that the game is not just about numbers, after all!

How to actually compare then?

If you really wanted to make such a comparison, you’d have to watch 100s of Football matches, read through 100s of player stats and study the hardships each player faced in their life among other things. And the best answer you could probably arrive at is that the comparison itself is futile! Each of them is ‘best’ in their own way… Or if you had to conclude, you’d be very specific and categorical in your answer instead of giving a generic statement like ‘Messi is better than Ronaldo’. Because the harder question people forget to ask here is what does ‘better’ actually mean?

And, who really wants to go through this gruelling process of analysing the information in such an impartial way just to decide who is a better player, right! Instead, we tend to spend some time going through various videos and articles on the internet and form our own opinion as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, it is not just for discussions like these but also for many important decisions in our life that we ignore such thinking. We do not want to burden ourselves so much in our daily decision making. We off-load as much thinking as possible and spend our mental energy only in certain situations — typically the office work!

This kind of confirmation bias happens all the time:

Religious affiliations: Is Hinduism better than Christianity
Political affiliations: Is Biden better than Trump
National Affairs: Is the farm bill bad for the farmers
Fanbases: Is Marvel better than DC
Diet plans: Is Vegan better than Keto
Global warming is not real
Covid vaccines do not work

The list is endless!

Conclusion

As we are no experts in certain situations, we rely on the views or opinions of others on the subject and seek answers. However, rather than looking for answers, we should question what we are looking for! Sadly, that kind of questioning requires a lot of rationality and our mind is super lazy to do that! The mind would rather know the answer ready-made than actually probe further. It would take the answer on the face of it than question the correctness of the question itself!

So, Confirmation Bias, basically, reinforces your already existing notions, beliefs, opinions, views, and expectations about anything. This helps us assess a situation faster, make decisions quickly and take necessary actions immediately. With that, we can spend our ‘mental energy’ on things that actually matter to us.

This happens because our mind doesn’t like to be questioned. It doesn’t want to be challenged. It doesn’t want to lose. It wants to win. It wants to be satisfied. The moment it finds that what it thinks is true, it becomes happy and reinforces that thought and tends to relax without any effort to validate it further. It requires an extra push to take the next step and validate further and we don’t want to give that extra push!

On the other hand, if it finds out anything contrary to the existing beliefs and expectations, it denies, resists, becomes restless and unhappy. And the mind tries very hard to avoid such situations and the easy way to do that is to comply with anything that reinforces the existing beliefs without questioning further.

So, the next time, when you think you are sure of something, that you are not biased in what you are saying and that you make total sense… Think again!

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

👍🏼 ➡️ If you liked it, please share it with others who might find it interesting!

💬 Also, please leave your comment or feedback below.

Hooked - book review

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 20:40:29 +0530

Hooked is one of those books which I would recommend to every aspiring Product Manager. In fact, anyone who is even sparsely connected with human psychology or behaviour should read this. It is a short, quick read and insightful with some clever real-world examples.

While reading the book, I had collated some important and wow moments in my notepad. I wanted to share them with others and thus this article. Please note that this in no way is the gist of the book! These are just some cool observations I made while reading the book and there could be plenty other cool observations I would have missed. So, I strongly recommend you to read the book than reading this article (yes, I am trying to sabotage myself here! — anything for a good read, right?).

Now that you have decided to read this article, let’s do it… The title of the book ‘Hooked’ is indicative of the user behaviour while using some of the current digital products. Products like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, Netflix and plenty others have quite literally hooked their users to use the product again and again. The author, Nir Eyal, explores the reason for this addictive behaviour and simply presents his findings with some cool real-life examples.

Nir Eyal analyses the user behaviour with the help of ‘The Hook Model’ — a habit-forming cycle of Trigger — Action — Variable Reward — Investment. It is this cycle that transforms behaviour into a routine and a habit. It is this cycle that helps us either make or break any habit. (This was described by James Clear in his book ‘Atomic Habits’ as well. Atomic Habits is another fantastic read if you are interested.)

In the Trigger phase, you are prompted by some trigger— either external or internal. This could be some information or a text message or a notification or a sound or an emotion or a memory from the past.

Example: A Facebook notification: ‘Sanjay and 5 others have commented on your post’

Next, in the Action phase, you take an action as a response to that trigger — something as small as replying to someone or as big as purchasing a house.

Example: You like Sanjay’s comment

The third step is about ‘Rewards’. All human actions inherently expect rewards and you take actions in anticipation of rewards. Nir Eyal uses ‘variable rewards’ and not just ‘rewards’ here. This is because you are more likely to form a habit because of the variable component of the reward than the reward itself. I will discuss this in detail later.

Example: You expect more people to like and comment. And also expect Sanjay to like or comment on your next post as well.

The last step in the Hook Model is Investment and it is critical for building habits. You can think of this as an investment of your resource: time or money or emotion etc. The more you invest your resources into a product, the more you value it and more likely are you to go back to it again. In other words, your perceived value of a product increases as you spend more time on it.

If you think about it, all these ‘addictive’ products try to keep you glued to them for as long as possible! And you tend to go back to using the product again with the slightest of a trigger because you have already invested much of your time or money or emotion into it, you want to see how that investment has shaped.

Example: As you liked Sanjay’s comment, you are drawn to another post by a mutual friend of yours and Sanjay’s. You click that, and bang — you enter the world of infinite scroll and auto-play videos. And before you notice, you have already spent the last 25min watching an uncle dance, some babies giggle and cats do funny faces.

But why is this happening?

Let’s look deeper into the Hook Model:

Triggers

There are two kinds of triggers for taking any action: external and internal.

External Triggers: External Triggers are those which are caused by an external stimulus, by some outside force or outside substance. Businesses use different types of external triggers prompting a user to take action :\

Paid trigger. Example: Spotify’s advertises for its new video podcasts. This makes you curious to check that out because you know that Spotify is a music streaming application and this advertisement about video podcasts surprises you
Earned trigger. A typical PR or a media mention. Example: Elon Musk’s tweet about Signal: ‘Use Signal’ caused mass hysteria and many started to use Signal after that
Relationship trigger. Example: Your friend tells you about how cool the new ‘FaceApp’ is and you feel like trying it once Owned trigger. A typical subscription, like that of a newsletter or a club membership, or an App icon on the phone. Example: You subscribed to Medium and open it once a week as Medium sends you an email about a new viral article every week. Or you frequently open WhatsApp on your phone just because the App icon is visible to you on your home screen. Owned triggers increase the repeat engagement of the user. Without owned triggers, it is difficult to form a habit.

Internal Triggers: Human emotions are the internal triggers that prompt the user to take an action. More often than not, negative emotions drive the user to spontaneously take an action than positive emotions.

Negative Emotions: boredom, fear, loneliness, frustration, confusion
Positive Emotions: happiness, motivation, compassion

Example: Now and then when you feel like you are bored, you tend to open Facebook or Youtube just to check what’s going on, without any external trigger.

New habits are sparked by external triggers, but the associations with internal triggers are what keeps them hooked to the product. Designers take special care in ensuring that internal triggers are taken care in the user journey with the product.

Rewards

Rewards create a dopamine surge in the brain. Dopamine, often referred to as the pleasure hormone, plays a vital role in how we feel. It helps us strive, focus and find things interesting. Higher the dopamine surge, higher the pleasure. As dopamine gets released, we surpass the brain’s decision and judgement areas and activate the parts associated with want and desire. So, if dopamine is released by doing some action then that action is directly associated with our wants and desires. And because of this association we want to do that action again in anticipation of the reward.

And introducing variability in rewards simply multiplies this effect. In addition, variability in rewards activates the nucleus accumbens region in our brain and spikes the levels of the neurotransmitter Dopamine, driving our hungry search for rewards further.

Most of the products use this rewarding mechanism to keep the users glued. There three types of variable rewards which Product Designers incorporate in their designs: Reward bythe Tribe, Reward by the Hunt, Reward by the Self

Tribe: We look for rewards in the form of social recognition or acceptance from our tribe, from those who are like us. We are more likely to alter our behaviours and beliefs if we see others who are more like ourselves being rewarded.

Example: Likes and comments on Facebook, upvotes and badges on Stackoverflow

Hunt: Variable reward which is given after the completion of a task.

Example: The outcome on the gambling machine after spinning it, total points accumulated after playing a round of Candy Crush

Self: This is a very personal form of gratification. These are fueled by intrinsic motivation

Example: You feel happy about 3 kills in PUBG today compared to only 1 kill yesterday

Companies spend a lot of time and effort in designing the perfect model of variable rewards. Variable rewards are not some magic fairy dust to sprinkle on the products, they are carefully designed considering why a particular user uses a product and what kind of variable reward aligns with the user’s internal triggers and motivations.

This brings us to the last step in the Hook Model: Investments

Investments

The above variable rewards combined with the investment of user’s time and effort into the product makes the user come back to the product again and again.

The reasons why we tend to go back to the product again and again:

We tend to value things more which we’ve created/put in our efforts
We tend to repeat our past behaviours

We tend to go back to the same product again and again because we have already invested our time or money or effort or emotions into it. The idea behind the investment phase is to leverage a user’s belief that the service will get better over time with further use and personal investment.

Some examples of different investments users make:

Content: Youtube, TikTok, Facebook
Data: Linkedin
Knowledge: Medium, Substack
Emotions: Instagram Stories
Money: Netflix Premium, Spotify Premium

It is pretty much this habit-forming cycle of Trigger-Action-Variable Reward-Investment that keeps us hooked to a particular product and makes us go back to it again and again.

In the rest of the article, you can find some related heuristics about this habit-forming cycle. In no particular order, I have provided some insights drawn in bits and pieces from the book: some experiments, theories and anecdotes related to this topic.

Fogg’s Model for human behaviour:**

According to Fogg’s model, any user behaviour depends on three things:

User’s motivation to do
User’s ability to do
User’s trigger to do

In fact, Fogg represents this by equation B = MAT. So, the behaviour is a product of Motivation, Ability and Trigger. If any of these is not present or is insufficient then the user will not cross the line to take an action and thus not form a habit.

Motivation:
Three Core Motivators in human beings:

Seek pleasure and avoid pain
Seek hope and avoid fear
Seek social acceptance and avoid rejection

Ability:
The factors that influence the ability to do a task are time, money, physical effort, mental effort, social acceptance, non-routineness of a task. It is found that the product designers focus on easing the scarciest resource at the moment of deciding to do a task or not.

Influencing behaviour by reducing the effort required to act is more effective than increasing someone’s desire to do it.

Example: You will find that the ‘Buy Now’ button on Amazon will be of same colour, shape and design across the website. This is to reduce the mental effort by the user to process what that button means. You need to process it only once, when you visit Amazon for the first time. Every other time, you know what that button means and hence you are eased of that mental effort.

Trigger:
I discussed Triggers earlier in this article.

Other Common Heuristics

There are some common heuristics which businesses typically make use of to trigger behaviours. As we see below, these heuristics are designed so that people make split-second decisions every day and yet remain unaware of how they are influenced in making those decisions.

The scarcity effect:
People associate more value to the things that are scarce. A study by Worchel, Lee, and Adewole showed that the perceived value of scarcer items was more than the items in abundance, though the items were the same.

Example: This effect is used by online retailers like Amazon: ‘Only 14 items in the stock.’

Another cool point in this context is that the perceived value increases as the product once abundant gradually becomes scarce.

Example: This is seen in Tele Shopping where products are sold on TV. In this, the product advertised will start with ‘Qty: 1000 available’ and the number is gradually reduced. As the number reduces from 1000 to 700 to 500, the viewers attach more value to the product and tend to place the order.

The Anchoring Effect: We get transfixed to something that is shown to us directly. We tend to believe it to be true on instinct and do not notice other things happening around us or question other things — we are too lazy to pay attention or question our instincts.

Example: You walk into a shopping mall and see the ‘50% Off’ signboard and instinctively go towards that. You rarely question what that 50% Off actually means. In most cases, 50% Off is given as part of a clearance sale on old products or on some other products which you wouldn’t otherwise purchase. The idea here is to get your foot in the door. Once there, the shopkeeper will try and sell other ‘costly’ products to you.

The Endowed Progress Effect: People tend to put more effort to reach a goal if they believe that they have made progress or are making progress towards that goal. It is a phenomenon that increases motivation as people believe that they can achieve the goal.

Example: To make more people update their profile, Linkedin uses the profile strength progress bar. As you notice that your profile is only 50% complete, you intrinsically yearn to fill in more details and hit a higher number on the progress bar.

The Framing Effect:
The environment in which a product or value is delivered affects the way the value is perceived.

Example: A musician playing in a paid concert will be valued more compared to the same musician playing in a subway for free. Another example, the same wine from a bottle tagged $1,000 will taste better than that from a bottle tagged $100!

Read more about the Framing effect here.

Note that some of the examples I mentioned above are not from the book but are my personal examples.

This brings to the end of the article. Hope you liked it!

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - book review

Sat, 10 Aug 2019 19:57:05 +0530

Many of us either in the school, or at work, or in any of the great speeches would have heard of the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. Give it a thought, pause for a minute and think about what effectiveness is and what efficiency is? Think of your own daily activities… can you name at least one activity in which you are very effective and one activity in which you are very efficient? What difference does that make?

Well, in very simple terms, being effective is doing the ‘right’ thing and being efficient is doing the thing ‘rightly’. So, it, essentially, is the purpose that differentiates effectiveness from efficiency. Assume you are a team leader, you are effective only when you and your team is aligned to the company’s vision, mission and goals — more the alignment more effective you will be. If you are not aligned with the vision, mission, and goals then you are not effective, all your efforts are of no use no matter how good you are at doing what you do. On the other hand, you are efficient if you are good at doing what you do, doesn’t really matter if it is important, or if it solves any problem at all. You are efficient in doing something if you are good at it irrespective of it being useful or not.

For example, assume you work in a company which manufactures ‘Moulded Dies’. If you make 1000 dies a day, you may be the most efficient person in the company to make dies. But you are completely ineffective if you make circular dies while the company wanted you to make square dies. All your efforts are waste and do not solve any problem, there is no purpose to what you do. In another example, a tablet for headache is ineffective if you use it if you have a stomach ache. No matter how many tablets you eat, unless you take the right tablet you will not be cured of the ailment. So, effectiveness is determined by taking the final goal/result into consideration.

In fact, in my own case, I have taken a resolution to read 24 books this year. I will be fully efficient in reading 24 books if I complete reading all of them. But, will I be effective? I will be effective if I read good books and take lessons from those books rather than just reading them. As a matter of fact, I have realized that ‘24 books a year’ is quite some benchmark and I am falling short by a large margin! So, my efficiency has gone for a toss. However, I think, as I am able to take lessons from these books I am getting better at being effective in my life, each page at a time.

So, stop for a moment. Think. Why are you doing what you are doing? Is that what you really should be doing or are you doing it because you are told to do so? Is that what your goal is? Is that what you seek in your life? Is that your ultimate purpose? In our lives, we are all paid for being efficient, for being good at what we do. In fact, we strive to be the best in the business. And someone else is paying for it because someone sees that you are effective for him/her… you are giving them the results they want. But, are you giving yourself the results you want? Are you really effective for yourself?

Stephen R Covey is widely known for his famous book — “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I finished reading the book recently and it has a great impact on how I think, how I talk and everything I do. So, here I am, sharing my views and lessons from the book. These are either the habits Stephen described in detail in the book or the habits that I seek to inculcate in my life. I do not really intend to review the book, as this book doesn’t require any review and it just is a great book for everyone out there who aspires to become a better self, every day.

When we say habits, all we recollect are the typical habits like getting up early in the morning, or reading a newspaper regularly or greeting your colleagues, or being punctual always, etc. These are just behavioral habits which can be practiced and displayed at a physical level and may not necessarily reflect a change or improvement at a deeper level. A level at which you truly believe in displaying them, and have complete integrity between your belief and actions. This change requires a stronger will and takes a huge character-building exercise. The 7 habits described by Stephen use that character-building.

Stephen uses the terms ‘Personal Ethics’ and ‘Character Ethics’; personal ethics are the ethical standards which are set to keep your behavior or personality in check. Behavioral or personality traits are visible to others and you rely on others’ feedback to measure your progress or improvement. These are all outward signs and projections others can notice. You, however, may not have a strong desire internally to keep up to these standards or you may lose interest if others stop giving you the feedback. These can be easily affected if they do not yield the required results.

For example, assume you determine to go to the gym regularly. You start going to the gym for 15 days and after 15 days if you notice that there is no change in your physique or if nobody has appreciated you for your efforts to go to the gym daily, you will lose all the interest and desire you had in the beginning and you stop going to gym. There was no real desire for self-improvement, only an attempt for outwardly change for immediate results to continue further. If results are not seen, you may never continue and no habit is formed. On the contrary, habits are formed by doing them, again and again, every day, and they then drive results, not the other way round. This requires a deep resolution that gets etched in your character.

Character ethics are your standards which you truly believe in. They are not set at a superficial physical level. They are basic principles of effective living and people can experience true success and happiness when they integrate these basic principles into their character. These principles are like guiding light, like lighthouses, they give direction and show the destination. These are the basic principles like integrity, humility, patience, simplicity, modesty, etc. It may sound very absurd and you may even think how can these help form habits! But, your character, fundamentally, influences everything you do — influences others and the environment around you. Your deep motives manifest into reality. So, unless there is a resolution to correct yourself deep down, at a fundamental level, you cannot form a habit that will be sustainable and help you experience true success.

It is only after you resolve yourself at an inner level, which is in your complete control, will you be able to move further and work on resolving other external factors which are not in your complete control, but which can be influenced. If you yourself are fundamentally flawed, without any respect to your own set of ethics, then you can never expect others to respect you. Without this respect and influence, you lose the sanctity in the interpersonal relationships and never be able to be effective which involves others.

An interpersonal relationship is as much important as your own ability to do things, as your effectiveness is not just a function of how you do things. In this world of interpersonal dependence, your effectiveness is fundamentally a function of you and other factors around you. In fact, in many cases, the factors around you play a major role to determine your effectiveness and if you can influence these factors around you, you can create synergy and be more effective.

In Stephen’s own words, you have two circles you find yourself in. The first is the ‘Circle of Concern’ and the second is the ‘Circle of Influence’. The circle of concern is where the problem is, where there is constant pain and worry. Unable to meet the targets is a concern for a sales manager or a child playing too much video game is a concern for a parent. In every difficult situation, you find yourself trapped in a circle of concern and deeply absorbed in the nuances of the problem. By being engrossed in the circle, you do not solve the problem. It only adds to the worry you already have and doesn’t take you away from it. However, solving this problem requires a completely new paradigm, which Stephen calls as ‘Circle of Influence’.

Circle of influence is where you have your influence, where you can actually control things which can affect your circle of concern and thereby solve the problem. You cannot really solve a problem by focusing on the problem, you can only solve it by focusing on the solution. It may sound very rudimentary and cliched, but this needs a completely different mindset — a mindset which is positive, problem-solving, creative, open for change, open for suggestions, and open for trial and failure. It takes a lot of courage to work with this mindset, as you may not necessarily see light at the end of the tunnel, but you stay positive and keep moving. By working in your circle of influence, you make positive progress. You know that you are working on a solution and any small positive effect will boost your confidence. Your confidence will be a cause for more progress leading to more positive effect. This builds a positive spiral and over time, you make so much progress that you don’t realize you are already out of the problem and take one positive step towards being effective.

As you work on the things you can control, things you can influence, you will be able to solve the problems in the circle of concern and eventually you notice that the circle of concern becomes smaller and smaller. So, you have to work in the circle of influence and grow your circle of influence. Bigger the circle, better will be your chances to be more effective. You are the center of the circle of influence. You form the essential core. As mentioned earlier, you can only influence others if they trust you, if they respect you and if they find you credible. So, it is important that you win yourself first — make yourself credible, before you make an attempt to win others or influence others. Stephen calls this ‘Private Victory’. Private Victory is the starting point of gaining others’ trust. And only Private Victory can lead to ‘Public Victory’, winning others. Private Victory always precedes Public Victory. No individual would show any interest in you or respect you if you don’t do it yourself. Effectiveness always starts with Private Victory, followed by Public Victory.

Stephen lays out the 7 habits with the first 3 focusing on Private Victory, the second 3 focusing on Public Victory and the last one on how to get better at these habits. With the context given above, let us look at these 7 habits.

All these habits are briefly given below. I wrote them in the shortest way possible. If you want to read them in detail, you must read the book. It is worth its time.

Habit 1: Be proactive

Being proactive is often confused with being fast or being quick. Being fast or quick is just one part of it. You are truly proactive if you are responsible and reliable. You make conscious efforts to ensure that are on top of the things which are expected from you. By doing so, you tend to be fast and quick. For example, assume you work in an IT firm and your client is a big deal for your company. Your team is working on a product and the release date is just a week away. You are NOT proactive if you do not really care about the quality and longevity of the product. You may just ensure that the product is working well in all test cases. But being proactive would mean, you take the complete responsibility of the product — even those aspects which otherwise would not be evident to the client. In the worst case, you will proactively communicate to the client about all the ‘invisible’ aspects of the product. But, never find discomfort in telling the truth, rather find comfort in not hiding anything. Taking responsibility is a huge mindset makeover. You do not usually own anything unless you are absolutely convinced about yourself and your ability to take ownership. And taking ownership in everything you do keeps you on top of things and tests your ability to take them to closure. You do not complain about how others were responsible for your failure. You take the beating if you fail and enjoy the fruit if you succeed. You own the failure as much as you own the success.

Habit 2: Start with the end in the mind

Start with the end in the mind means that you are clear with what your expectations of the end outcome are. You know exactly what you want. You know the outcome you are working for. This outcome is something that you feel very well connected to. This outcome could be an immediate activity you are working on, or a short term goal of a year or a long term goal of 20 years or anything which you do. The idea is, unless you know what you are working for, you cannot prepare yourself for it and you may not be moving in the right direction to complete it. In many cases, the outcome you intend is only possible with right efforts from different people around you and you cannot ensure that all are moving in the right direction if you are not clear of what you want! Without having any goal or end result in mind is like a cat chasing its tail — the cat may find itself busy but is utterly pointless for others.

Habit 3: Prioritize

Stephen very well quotes: “People prioritize their schedules, but in fact, they should schedule their priorities”. Prioritizing things has been one main focus of many people who try to be more effective. However, most of these ‘prioritization’s are on urgent items, burning issues, critical concerns, unexpected escalations, etc. It is understandable that which cannot be postponed, which needs immediate attention should be treated with priority. But, could these cases be avoided? In most of the cases, it is yes! We generally do not tend to focus on fixing a severe problem with long term solution — so the problem repeats itself and consumes our ‘urgent’ time. We do not spend time on creating a robust system, leaving loopholes which require your attention time and again. If you are a process manager, you can relate to how important setting a good process is. If you do not spend enough time creating a foolproof process, you regret spending unimaginably more time fixing smaller issues which occur at a later point in time. This is an ineffective way of doing things though you may be spending your time in firefighting doing something which is both important and urgent. However, you could have avoided this situation if you had spent enough time doing something which was important but not urgent — setting up the process in the first place.

This takes us to the second habit — start with the end in your mind. If you think long and start early, you will be working on something which is important but not urgent. But over time, you will have a robust process in place which will avoid all minor issues which do not need your attention. So, the ideal way of doing things is spending more time on ‘Important but not urgent’ activities. Initially, it will be challenging to move away from doing ‘important and urgent’ activities to ‘important but not urgent activities’, but as long as you have your end goal in mind you will consider the challenges unimportant or work to resolve them. As you do more of ‘important but not urgent’ activities, you notice that your ‘important and urgent’ bucket of activities becomes smaller and smaller and that is the ideal way you can be more effective.

Habit 4: Think win-win

In the majority of your activities, you deal with people either directly or indirectly. And their involvement determines your effectiveness. You cannot win everything with your effort alone. You need others also to support you, in your cause. But, in order to win, you tend to disregard others and think only about how you can win without much concern about others. This will hamper your relationship with others and may not be the most effective way of doing things in the long run.

The ‘win-win’ thinking comes from an abundance mentality. Abundance mentality says that there is enough cake for both the parties to take away. Abundance mentality creates broader and bigger platforms for discussions for both the parties and you both would discover newer ways and newer ideas of doing things which otherwise did not exist. Also, it is not possible to find everyone who is happy with the ‘win-win’ model of working. There are people who only work with ‘lose-win’ mentality — where they win and you lose. The best way in such cases is you convince the other person for a ‘win-win’ deal, else walk away. There is no use wasting your time when you know that it is not the most effective way of doing things in the long run. It will collapse one day. So, refrain from it from the beginning only. At the same time, do not press on others for a ‘win-lose’ deal — this will again hamper your relationship on the long run. Refrain from it as well. Always think ‘win-win’.

Habit 5: Seek first to understand than to be understood

Understanding others is what we think we do, but seldom do it. It is only our perception that we have understood the other person well. It takes an unbelievably long time to actually understand the other person. And it is very much essential that we build this understanding. We do not listen well to understand completely, we listen only to respond back. In our hurry to make others understand, we lose our ability to understand others. We all have our own set of presumptions, our own ideals, our own principles and our own way of looking at things. But to understand the other person well, you need to first know their complete point of view, the reason for such a point of view. Only after you know that will you be able to understand. Only when you understand others will you be able to consider their true point of view and accommodate in your thinking and thereby comprehensively building a more accurate ‘win-win’ situation.

So, stop listening to respond and start listening to understand and empathize. Listen, not just by words, but by tone, mannerisms, body language, and all aspects of non-verbal communication. Everything speaks if you listen.

Habit 6: Synergize

Synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of individual parts. Assume that in a manufacturing company, two products X and Y are sold at ₹100 and ₹200 respectively. The company then uses some of its techniques to combine X and Y and creates a new product that can be sold at ₹500. Here, an additional value of ₹200 is created! This is synergy. Synergy doesn’t only happen in physical entities or companies. The reason synergy existed in the manufacturing company above is because different people have come together and created a new product. So, synergy can be created when different people come together with a mindset to create something more than what is existing.

In order for you to be more effective, you need to synergize with others. Only when this happens will you be able to do more with less — less time, less money… fewer resources and fewer resources are a crucial part of the effectiveness equation. With this synergistic way of doing things in the right direction, you will be more effective.

Habit 7: Sharpen your saw

Being effective is a never-ending process. There is always more that you can do of yourself, for yourself. It needs an open mind to learn new things, new ways, meet new people and do new things. You need to sharpen your saw, keep getting better at your habits in the area of Private Victory as well as in the area of Public Victory. Visit them, every day and try to be better the next day. It is the only way forward to be more effective. You don’t postpone it to tomorrow, you do it today. With these, I leave you with the 7 Habits I read in the book and find useful in building an effective lifestyle — a minute improvement each day, every day!

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

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The Heartfulness Way

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:34:42 +0530

It would be foolish of me if I proclaim that I was able to understand everything discussed in the book. ‘The Heartfulness Way’ is not a preaching which is to be read and understood in the first place. It, rather, is a way of life which needs to be practiced, experienced and felt deep inside. It helps in giving a direction and presents a way to look into one’s own self, lead a peaceful life and attain the real purpose of our life. So, here is a short take on what I ‘understood’ about the book and the Heartfulness practice.

The book is a series of dialogues between Joshua Pollock, a Heartfulness practitioner and trainer and Kamlesh D Patel, the fourth guru in the Heartfulness lineage, widely known as Daaji. As the presentation is in a conversational style, it is well structured and very engaging. In this conversation between Guru and Shishya, Pollock is the Shishya seeking knowledge on various aspects of meditation, why to meditate, how to meditate, and its relevance and importance to life, more so in the context of current hectic lifestyle where stress is an everyday affair and finding time a rarity.

Many a time, this conversation reminded me of the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna during the war of Kurukshetra! However, this conversation in the book is not preachy at all. In fact, it is written in a very simple, easy-to-understand language and anyone, even those who are new to meditation or spirituality, can easily understand the prescription(if I may use the word) to meditation, and thereby to the higher goal of life.

Also, those who practice meditation regularly may find ‘The Heartfulness Way’ more revealing, as Pollock who used to meditate regularly before meeting Daaji found Heartfulness more helpful in discovering Self than other methods. In more simpler words, ‘The Heartfulness Way’ is meditation-made-easy for both the beginners and the experienced alike.

Starting from how meditation should be an ‘effortless focus’ and how to make it effective to how meditation can help one explore higher realms of consciousness, Daaji neatly explains how the Heartfulness way’s meditation goes through the different stages of Ashtanga Yoga — Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi. Through Pollock’s questioning, Daaji takes us through the complete process of the Heartfulness meditation. All the minute details are covered — where to meditate, when to meditate, how long to meditate, what posture to meditate in and how to be ‘effortless’ in doing all this. An important aspect mentioned was the ‘Object’ of meditation — the object really is the core of the entire Heartfulness practice (at least, that is what I think!). Well, with practice only will one discover what these different stages really take them through and what lies in the depths of consciousness. It needs to be explored and found out by experience. An in-dweller, seeking a way to experience inner joy and happiness can only taste it when practiced, not just by reading it in a book. So, reading is all good but useless if not practiced.

Another mystic subject discussed was Yogic Transmission. Quoting Daaji here: “Transmission is the hallmark of Heartfulness way. Transmission is the key to Heartfulness approach”. I really cannot comment on it as I think this is not something that can be read and understood — it can only be experienced and felt, with the help of a Heartfulness trainer. This was earlier done by Ramakrishna Paramahamsa to Swami Vivekananda. This was not accessible to many earlier and was a subject of mystery, but with Heartfulness it is more easily accessible now, and the transmission from a trainer to a practitioner is possible. So, all you need is to find a trainer and your utmost dedication.

Finally, other steps in the entire process are ‘Cleaning’ and ‘Prayer’. Cleaning is basically eliminating one’s negative(or even positive) emotions or impressions or Samskaras. It is a process in which one can leave behind all the mental and emotional baggage one carries every day and at the end one can actually feel lite. The importance of Cleaning and its process is again explained in a very realistic way in detailed steps. Prayer is a way to remind ourselves, constantly, again and again, ‘the real purpose of our life’. The need for Prayer and what exactly to pray is given. The words in the prayer, as Daaji says, have a deeper meaning and one can only relate to the inner significance with regular prayers… the prayer only reveals itself more deeply with every day practice.

Well, as the book says, ‘The Heartfulness Way’ doesn’t really end with meditation. Meditation, actually, is the beginning! Daaji urges the reader (through Pollock) to move from the act of meditation to being in a state of ‘Meditativeness’. It is not an activity to do for a day, a week or a month. It is to be imbibed internally. The calmness should pervade into your entire day, into your life. The journey is endless and the seeker only needs to move forward. With constant inner exploration through meditation, the seeker will discover new realms which never existed before.

So, this is a very rudimentary presentation of my ‘understanding’ of the book. There may be many mistakes or differences from the actual Heartfulness practice. And if any Heartfulness practitioner or trainer is reading this, I would like to know from them and correct myself. I really look forward to meditate and explore my inner self! For others seeking a practical way to meditate, you can read the book and start practicing. Till then… peace!

Thanks to Sudha Yalamanchili for recommending and presenting this book to me 😊 … And I’m off to reading another book.

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

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Wait, to not give up

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 19:27:50 +0530

When the exam results are out, your heart would skip a beat. It is natural to get anxious and you would get restless until you check the result. You quickly open the computer, search Google and get a list of websites. You will most probably click three or four links, thanks to Google. Any delay will add to those small moments of anxiety. What goes through your mind? How do you feel when you type your hall ticket number and the page starts loading? What if the website is slow and is takes longer than usual to display your result?

This is one of those moments when all you can do is just wait… for a few seconds or may be a minute, till you get to see your result. And you will finally get back to normalcy. Phew! Imagine if this phase is extended to an hour… two hours… a day or two! You may smash the computer screen! As you are able to read this, I guess you would have had your share of those stimulating hours of uncertainty, that anxiety, at some time or the other… during cricket/football matches, distribution of test papers in class, placement results, dance competition results, while on the way to catch a train etc… Just think!

Back in 2009, when I was in NIT Warangal, we had to organize the Freshers Event. It was our second year, and we were organizing it for the first time. We planned to get our batch T-Shirts printed and give it as Freshers gift. The T-Shirt design was ready and I was not sure of how to get it printed. The printer asked for .cdr format but we had .psd format ONLY - for the obvious reason that it was easy to get. Time was running out and the printer asked for a minimum of 15 days to print and deliver the shirts. We had allocated our budget for T-Shirts and everything was planned accordingly. So there was no going back and we had to find our way out. We ran down all the options: searched DC++ for the software, read stuff online and asked many seniors. Given the time, There was only one way out…

I still remember that night - I sat in our final year students’ hostel verandah, waiting. I got a senior’s contact and was waiting for him. He was, then, the go-to-guy for T-Shirts in our college. I did not meet him before and he, obviously, did not know me. I wasn’t sure if he would help us, he sounded very reluctant on the phone. There was a little hope and I was sitting there, waiting for him. I waited for about two hours and that felt like hell. I couldn’t do anything else, but to wait. When I got restless I went to his room, for about 4 or 5 times only to find it locked. I had already bugged him by calling so many times that I did not take any chance to call him again. I read the hostel notice board, just to seem busy and avoid myself getting bullied by other seniors. The ‘guy’ had come, finally! He saw me sitting on the bench and reluctantly asked for my pen drive.

We went into his room, a typical B.Tech. final year student’s room… you wouldn’t know if a cloth on the floor was a towel or a door-mat! Anyway, he opened the file and checked the design. First thing he uttered: “Kya hai yaar ye… itne saare layers and some are not even proper… Main merge bhi nahi kar sakta.” (“What’s this, dude? There are so many layers and some are not even proper. I can’t even merge them.”)

It was my first Photoshop design to go for printing, so there was no way for it to be professional! I had to quietly nod to whatever he said. “Abhi nahi hoga, it will take time.” - “I can’t do it now, it will take time.” But, it had to be sent to the printer without any further delay! I requested him… pleaded him… begged him - bas pau pakadna baaki tha! and he finally agreed to be awake and do it.

I was sitting behind him, quietly listening to his comments on how bad the file was and his suggestions for me. He did some rework on a few layers, added a few more layers and took the design into Corel Draw - saved it in .cdr format and gave it to me. Such a relief!! I was jubilant, felt like jumping and shouting! I thanked him and ran to my hostel, sent the file to the printer and Done! Wow!

Now, during that phase, when there was no other option than to just wait and do nothing, I felt like my head will burst. “Let’s chuck the T-Shirts, we can give some other gift” - this thought occurred a hundred times. I wanted to fast forward time, to the next day and get away from that feeling. But, when the shirts arrived, just a day before the event, everyone was excited about them and there was JOY - when you see that in others… believe me, all your efforts are paid!

In the hindsight, when I think about it again… that time which I waited is in fact the most I cherish. Had I not waited, we would have never got the shirts done. My friend still has one of those shirts with him which he still wears. I hope our juniors also might still have it. It’s a simple white print on a black cotton shirt.

Pic here… it’s quite old now: 13 years! (as of 2021)

So, whenever you think that you cannot push it anymore, remind yourself that you’ve come this far only to go further, not breakdown!

YOU CAN DO IT!

Thank you for reading! 🙏🏼

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