Karthi

Writing is fascinating. Every language uses a combination of letters to create millions of words that express thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Whether it's advertisements or classics, everything is composed of these words. Writers have different styles of writing, which contribute to about 20 different types of writers based on what they write, how they write, and their approach to writing.

Broadly speaking, writers can be categorized into two groups: fiction and nonfiction. Within these categories, there are many different writing styles that you may already be familiar with.

Type of Writers: Novelists, songwriters, lyricists, poets, playwrights, short story writers, screenwriters, bloggers, business writers, copywriters, content writers, ghostwriters, journalists, non-fiction book writers, technical writers, translators, UX writers, biographers, editors, critics, and columnists.

Out of all these different types, product makers need to master two specific writing styles: content writing and copywriting.

Content writing aims to inform the reader, while copywriting aims to sell to the reader.

While content writing focuses on providing valuable information and engaging readers, copywriting aims to persuade and drive action. Both forms of writing require creativity, and an understanding of the target audience.

Core skills get you the job. Meta skills get you promoted.

My time at Amazon proved me that, out of all the meta skills, writing helps you bring clarity, precision and purpose to any discussion. The product maker in me got sculpted by Amazon way of writing.

Here are ten tips if you are trying to write narratives the Amazon way:

1. Brevity: Write short sentences. Short sentences are easy to read and understand compared to long complex sentences.

2. Clarity: Write with an eraser and remove all unnecessary words in the sentence. The clarity of the message improves, and your writing gets effective sentence by sentence.

3. Specificity: Write persuasively by replacing all adjectives, adverbs and vague words with data. Data provides evidence for all your assertions.

4. Purpose: Every piece of writing should have a clear purpose and a call to action. If your reader cannot answer the questions why you wrote and what action they should take, your writing failed.

5. Accessibility: Your writing should be accessible to all readers. Avoid using jargons, technical language and acronyms.

6. Know thy Audience: Write for your audience. Consider their relatability, knowledge, expertise and adjust your language accordingly.

7. Descriptive: Show and don't tell with your writing. Use descriptive language so that the users can imagine as they read.

8. Formats: Use appropriate formats to convey your ideas. It need not be a essay or a memo or a report always. You could use 1-pagers, 6-pagers, FAQs, your writing can be more engaging and effective.

9. Wholistic: Keep the main document focused and easy to read. All supporting facts to the appendix. It helps them fully understand your ideas.

10. Use Subject-Verb-Object way of writing. Whom - Why- Purpose behind the writing.

After you finish writing, do a so-what test. Your writing must convey a clear purpose or message.

Reimagine your narrative using the Amazon way of writing. It forces you to think clearly. Writing the Amazon way takes more intent and time to craft a message. It is hard but totally worth it.

After Amazon I am unable to think about something without writing a narrative. By writing my thinking got improved.

P.S: To write a one-pager, I write ten pages first and filter the clarity to save time for the reader.

"I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things being good is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we're carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what's happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better." ~ Rick Rubin

There are no good/bad ideas. There are only Ideas. GM ☕️

As forever students of human behaviours, designers know a thing or two about how human beings buy. For someone interested in selling, understanding buying behaviours is pivotal.

Here are some observations around how human beings acquire value👇

1. Human beings love buying. They hate being sold to. In other words they hate being pushed, manipulated, lied to and pressurised. Anything that takes away freedom and choice, is hated by sapiens. If you allow customers to do what they love to buy in their own time, they will like you as a sales person.

2. Human beings chase scarcity. Scarcity gives them vanity, pride, ego and other intangible values. Your duty as a sales person is to make your customer understand how scarce the item is. This fastens their decision making. Discounts, offers, deals, luxury are all different ways of inducing scarcity.

3. Human beings live in a dynamic context. Their life keeps changing. So don't look for a target customer. Look for a target use case. Solve for the specific use case (jobs to be done) and showcase the benefits. If the customer perceives the product as more valuable, sale happens automatically.

4. A product/service can't solve all problems to all people. It typically solves one or two use case(s) for a set of people. Find that set of people who have those use cases and help those people solve their problems. Sales will happen effortlessely. Don't allow your sales targets and deadlines push you hard into deliberate selling.

5. Customer's buying decision and thinking patterns are not in your locus of control. The only thing you could do is help them see how to get what they want (provided you have what they want). Provide them with enough rationale and evidence so that they can make informed choices and buy what you are selling 🤞

6. Specificity(niche) wins. It speaks directly to the customer who has a context you are addressing. It helps you focus your sales efforts and deliver better results. You cannot please everyone and you should never try to. If your niche is super specific, your positioning gets focused.

7. If despite helping the customer in the context (use case) is not helping revenues, change the product or the offer. Iterate (pivot if need be) till you find traction. Waiting for things to change with time will not help. Human beings don't pay attention to things that are not in front of them. Don't fade away and expect them to remember you.

   Hope your sales strategies can utilise these nuances ✨

It is human to want abundance but to chase scarcity. This behaviour of sapiens is fascinating. Now that we have handled the basic aspects of user experience hierarchy like functionality, reliability, durability and even usability, it is time to move up the ladder towards pleasure and significance. Following the order the next highest form of sophistication and scarcity is personalisation.

Personalisation is already here in its nascent form. Amazon to Spotify to Netflix, we already feel the goodness of personalisation. The main goal of personalization is to deliver content and functionality that matches specific user needs or interests, with no effort from the targeted users. The system profiles the user and adjusts the interface and its content according to the profile specifics.

Sometimes it is irritating when the ML (Machine learning) is dumb and gets you wrong but to a large extent we are tolerant and even happy when the interface speaks to you in the form of "your daily mix" or "98% match".

Here are some considerations for personalisation design 👇

• Let's start with a myth buster. Using mail merge is not personalisation 🙈 It is much deeper than that. Just by calling your user with their first name by a bot doesn't make them feel better 🤷‍♀️

• Responsible data collection from different touch points will help you to improve the experience throughout the customer journey. 69% of customers are "ok" to give their private data to the business for personalisation. They just don't want the information to be shared outside the company. They are generally happy with real-time, personalised content across all channels.

• Deep dive into data collected from the user (implicit), contextual data provided by the user (location, device) and data collected based on dynamic user behaviours (explicit) to gather insights into dynamic customer journeys. You'll be surprised to see how much your user will reciprocate to the algorithmic understanding.

• Take into account for changing emotions/moods while personalising customer journeys. A number of products fail to address these aspects right now.

• Both abundance and scarcity are appreciated by the customer. So allow the customer to beat the choice fatigue of abundance and get the goodness of scarcity by curating the feed. Netflix handles this well by giving "play something" feature to beat abundance and specific recommendations for a user profile based on contextual and explicit data.

  I wonder why Netflix is not yet high on implicit personalisation 🧐

  
  

When it comes to First principle thinking, the popular names we hear ranges from Aristotle to Charlie Munger to Elon Musk.

In all honesty, every design thinker, every chef out there, ought to use first principles to solve problems. It is impossible to unleash creative possibilities otherwise.

For example, chefs use first principles at all times (whereas cooks don't). A chef understands the basic properties of ingredients and has innate understanding of how to combine them. A cook on the other hand follows a recipe and recreates what is already created with slight variations. A chef will never be stranded without a recipe. They invent new recipes from what is available. They play with combination of ingredients. They work based on elements and ratios.

The same analogy can be applied to design thinkers as well. A design thinker will never be stranded when the design systems or existing screens or research reports are not available. They reason from the grounds up.

Here are some characteristics of first principles thinking 👇

• First principles thinking starts with questioning existing beliefs and conventions. The questions help to drill down the foundational truths of a problem. Once the truths are uncovered, the thinking shifts to more imaginative and creative solutions.

• The basis of every creative problem solving exercise is deconstruction and reconstruction. A complicated problem is broken into basic elements. The solution is then reconstructed from the ground up. This is the only way problem solvers can move from linear to non-linear results.

• Every first principle is a foundational proposition that stands alone (like an atom) and is pure. We cannot deduce it from any other proposition or assumption.

• Reasoning by first principles removes the biases, assumptions and conventions. What remains is only essentials. It allows us to build our thinking from ground up. No wonder it is hard and hence very few do it.

• It is human to rely on past assumptions or beliefs. It's quick and easy to do so. This way of thinking leads to unimaginative solutions which are variants of what is already existing.

• Analogy helps with speed but reasoning from first principles helps with creativity.

• When first principles form the foundations, the solution is sturdy. Elon Musk built both SpaceX (rockets) and Tesla (batteries) based on first principles. BuzzFeed's vitality is built on first principles.

• When the principles at work are understood clearly, old assumptions fade away and decision can be made on the right methods to be used.

  Methods like Socratic Questioning, Descartes method of doubt and Five Why's are used to help with first principles thinking.
  

Thirteen pieces of timeless advice given to M.Des (Strategic Design Management) students of National Institute of Design as a part of jury.

1. Strategic Design is all about focus. Focus comes by saying deliberate NOs. Saying NO is hard for all sapiens. Use your technical (design) competence to show why a NO makes more sense than YES in the current context. Influence decision makers with your competence + character to prioritise NO over yes.

2. Tightly hold on to your strengths and loosely hold on to your weakness. It is human to chase weakness to win it. Don’t do it. Amplify your strengths and play with it. Discard your weaknesses at all cost. This is how you acheive Wu Wei in life.

3. As a designer, creative problem solving is your job. Love and live the problem. Solutions will emerge by itself when your love for problem deepens.

4. Design is a collaborative sport. It can’t played solo. Don’t try to. You will fail. Working with other human beings is an integral part of your (and my) work, as a designer. Master this art deliberately. Success is inevitable.

5. A designer's job is 24/7 by nature. 8/5 is not for us. We learn at all times and our learnings compound consistently. Don't stop this learning whatsoever.

6. A curious mind has more questions than answers. No wonder your mind is always buzzing. Follow your questions with sanctity and it will lead you to answers.

7. Embracing ambiguity and seeking clarity are the core mindsets of a designer. Everything we do in the name of design (hypothesis, process, explorations, experiments, systems, prototypes and evidences) is all about moving from chaos to clarity.

8. Never look for only bad things. Focus on all aspects (Good, Bad and Ugly) at all times. That is how your holistic thinking works.

9. Design never ends. It is a continuous and an iterative process. Do just enough every time deliberately and always make it better in the next iteration.

10. Move beyond the default human being in you. Start paying attention to human biases, distortions, fallacies, flaws, mistakes and slips. Let the default nature of human help you move beyond the default human inside you.

11. Your ability to zoom in and zoom out is your super power. From a mere-mortal you become a maker just by harnessing this super power.

12. You start with an objective. You use design process to arrive at outputs. You will check if the outputs bring in the strategic outcomes. OOO matters.

13. To grow as a designer, work with insanely ambitious people. They will push you hard and make you discover a better version of yourself.

One last thing, because we work with and for human beings at all times, we tend to move into the philosophical realm effortlessly. But don’t forget that your main effect is to use your competence and solve problems creatively. Don't focus too much on the side effects and get carried away.

As the name suggests, a landing page is a standalone page where your potential customer "lands" after directed by an email or ad or search.

Usually a landing page is super specific page created for a specific purpose such as lead generation or click-through sale by providing something of value such as an email course, a white paper, a playbook, a webinar etc in exchange for contact information.

Here are some best practices from creating 100s of landing pages 👇

1. Social proof enhances your credibility. Instead of copy pasting the words from a customer testimonial, show the actual screenshot from social media or email or a text. Prioritise authenticity over cleanliness.

2. Segment your customers. Lead each segment to a specific landing page to appeal to people with different desirability.

3. Boost the visibility of your landing page in search engines with SEO. Optimise for specific keywords in your landing page. For eg: best design tips for landing pages vs landing pages.

4. Ensure your copy writing speaks to your target audience directly and hooks them. Clearly tell them how they can get value. For eg: Get your favourite meals at the press of a button is far better compared to quick deliveries from local restaurants.

5. Make sure the call to action (CTA) is self explanatory. eg: Book a free demo now is so much better compared to just Sign-up.

6. Real faces make a real difference. Add your photos and videos for authenticity. Make sure they are professionally done.

7. Address your potential customer's apprehension and doubts upfront specifically. Eg: Build your customer website in 20 mins. No code vs Build your own website. This is possible only when you understand your customer deeply.

8. Provide a quick way to contact you via chat or phone. It is a sign of authenticity and legitimacy, telling your customers that you’re there to help at all times.

9. Set the layout of your landing page once and keep the same. With changes or new information, keep replacing the old ones. Do not add more to the existing landing page. It will break the layout.

10. Make it fun, valuable and novel. This will give your visitors a reason to share with their friends.

Landing pages need not be a part of evergreen navigation of a website. They could be created for the specific moment of an ad campaign to serve the target audience.

In addition to helping with lead generation, landing pages also help in increasing conversions, providing insights to audience and boosting brand credibility.

Product Design is a continuous and an iterative process.

Managing design improvements on the go and handing off newly minted designs to the development teams gets very tricky especially when the team handles a complex product.

• Screen-wise or page-wise design and development handoff is too rudimentary. What worked for simple websites, doesn't work for large products. An application is far more dynamic and complex. A number of interconnections and states must be considered.

• It gets extremely difficult for designers to explain all the application states and responsive variants in a document using static mockups for the development teams.

• Design iterations are hard on development teams. They get blocked by design teams. If they proceed without final designs in place typically inconsistency creeps in.

In a nutshell, managing design at scale is a nightmare.

Moving from page-based approach into a component-based model (atomic design) optimised design-developer workflows. But reusable components alone wasn't enough.

With component libraries in place, multiple sources of truth existed in many places (design tool, code, documentation) and without a governance model it was hard to improve the reusable components. This gave birth to a new way of working: Design Systems.

In a nutshell, a design system is product (scalable and repeatable system) that serves products. It can't be treated as a one-off project.

A design system is a time and energy intensive proposition. It requires a dedicated team to maintain and upgrade. It takes training for the product team to adopt and adapt to the design system. So for simple and one-off projects, a design system is not needed. Just a pattern library is good enough. Creating a design system for every project is like killing a mosquito with a bazooka.

A design system must include both tangible and intangible aspects of building scalable complex products (code, philosophy, libraries, principles and guidelines).

Whenever we build a design system for ourselves or our clients, we ensure it contains design language, design tenets, documentation, style libraries, component libraries, a sandbox to play around, best practices and a governance model that helps in managing the system.

Design system is a perfect example of Gall's Law.

John Gall said every complex system that works was invariably created from a simple system, and that every complex system that was created from scratch as a complex system always breaks and fails and cannot be patched to work.

A good design system helps in operationalising and optimising design efforts in a large organisation. Without good governance, a great design system can become unwieldy collections of components and code that makes product teams lives a living hell.

Product Design as a subject is human-centric and domain agnostic, so should we care if we are solving a B2B problem or a B2C problem? Is it not the same? Let's dive in 👇

While the principles of good design is intact, there are a few nuances to note down when designing for B2B and B2C.

• In a business-business (B2B) model, businesses sell products and services to other businesses. In a business-company (B2C) model, businesses sell directly to individual customers. The common denominator in both the models is selling.
  
  In B2C we sell to people directly.
  In B2B we sell to people who work in a business.
  
  In B2C we sell directly to the to decision makers. In B2B we sell to influencers who in turn sell to decision makers. The order of selling brings in a lot of complexity for B2B.

  As the designer, it is important to understand this nuance because customer insighting methods can be very different for B2B and B2C.

• A B2B product typically helps its employees to get the work done or do it better-faster-cheaper. By default there is no skin in the game or incentive for the employees to enhance the products they are using day-in and day-out. Where as a B2C product directly helps the customer to get things done. As the customer uses the product directly, they demand better, faster and convenient ways of getting things done. Hence the product experience is more delightful for B2C products compared to B2B products.

• B2B products typically have complex workflows, large data sets, multiple user segments and divergent user needs compared to B2C products.

• Typically experts handle B2B products. Quirkiness, delight, detailed steps and pleasure may intrude getting the job done. Micro interactions and flashy animations may annoy the user.

• The complexity and scale of a B2B product is high. The features are intertwined. The schema is complex. Changing a workflow in one feature may affect multiple workflows unintentionally. In B2C, workflows can be simplified on the go and workflows can be split without much impact on the architecture.

• B2B products are used by the employees day-in and day-out. Too many steps or large illustrations, many micro interactions, long loading times hinders the functionality of the product. B2B products are made for efficiency and effectiveness whereas B2C products are made for delight and ease.

The common sentiment is B2B products are boring and unsexy compared to a B2C product.

If you love complex problem solving and challenges of scale B2B might be your thing. If you love designing for delight and for a large customer base B2C might be your thing.

With the rise of technology and accessible infrastructure, building products has never been easier. At the same time, building successful products has never been harder as well because there are more products competing for user attention than ever.

Building great products in a lot of hard work. 

Creative ideas, wild swings, strong gut feel, great resilience does yield good traction but there is no set formula that assures product success. You could increase the probability of success using product experiments.

Experimentation is a great way to learn and prioritise precious resources. This makes it a key component in building a successful product.

Here are some learnings and reflections from conducting 1000+ product experiments 👇

• An experiment is a sandbox that helps you control who participates in the study, the objective of the study, specific aspects that are tested, make bets on specific features and measure using data for actionable insights. This helps the product team to advance in the right direction and stay clear from the wrong path.

• At the base of every product there is a customer. And every customer is a human being. It is hard to know what are the needs and wants of a human being in a dynamic context. With structured experiments it is easy to learn the real impact your product has on its customers.

• Every experiment starts with a hypothesis (guess) and every experiment ends with an evidence that proves the hypothesis right or wrong. That is a great starting point. Experiments help you kickstart product thinking in case you are stuck and overwhelmed.

• Every great experiment lists down its objectives, assumptions, questions to be answered, decisions to be made, areas of uncertainty, areas of impact and most importantly what to measure. Even before the experiment starts put down everything you know about the topic in one place so you tick and cross post the experiment. This is how the product team's understanding of the product compounds exponentially.

• More than what to keep, experiments help you make an informed decision on what to eliminate from the product.

• Build a dedicated labs in your org to run experiments. Having a name and a place associated for experiments boosts the confidence of experimenters to attempt. The fear of failure slowly gets eradicated and it becomes a culture in the teams.

  In my view, experiments are a way to extract gold from dirt. In the process there will always be a lot of dirt and very little gold.

  Setting right exceptions, having great perseverance and being very patient with the process of experiments will help you building great products.

Nope! I am not talking about Project management or Product management here. Instead, I want to share my experience of painfully figuring out what is a product or what is a project and why should a designer care about it !

The quest started when I had to deliver a UI Strategy for 26 SKUs of OfficeJet printers at Hewlett Packard in 2008. I had no clue how to get it done in such a scale 🤔 Looking backwards, this was one of the crucial project of my career.

I solved one part of the problem first by using Product thinking. Instead of 23 interface variants across 26 SKUs, I combined all of them into just 2 types of interfaces which can be extended across 4 screen resolutions. We rolled out one-fifth of the specs in our OfficeJet Pro 8600 series that year. From this project I learnt, how many new requirements we progressively discovered after market launch.

We took all the learnings from rollout one and implemented it part by part for all the SKUs in five project phases across 15 months. That was the first time I understood the power of projects that help flawless execution of products. Till date HP printers run on that strategy (more or less) and it is already 10 years.

Here is what I learnt about projects and products as a designer👇

A project has a start date and an end date. It has an Objective, an Output and an Outcome. The three OOOs are a must for any project. To deal with a project, a designer must have a mindset of getting it right and optimising risk.

A product doesn't have a time attached to it. Product building never ends. The specs are never carved in stone. A product gets discovered progressively. To deal with the product, a designer must have a mindset to seek clarity and embrace ambiguity.

For a designer, both products and projects are important because products get done within a project. Whether it is a sprint or a release plan or a roadmap, at the end of the day it is a project in which a product gets shaped. I call this a triangle-circle phenomenon. Depending on the dimensions of the triangle (Time, Scope, Resources), the circle (product specs) is rolled-out and not otherwise.

Typically designers go wrong in not understanding the project boundaries for the products they are building (like the younger me). I wanted the entire line to get the UI strategy in one shot. I was an idiot then 🙈

Later I learnt, it is the boundaries that give the freedom. Within each project, we got an opportunity to improve the product leaps and bounds. Without constraints there is no creativity. A designer who understands this is loved by the product team.

If there is one term that is used, overused, misused and abused in the past decade then Design Thinking perfectly fits the bill 🙈

Some leaders brush off design thinking as common sense and some use the creative problem solving methodology to exponentially transform their organisations, processes and customer lives 🤷‍♀️

Here are some observations and reflections from my tenure as a design thinker 👇

• Design thinking is a composite skill. It is an alchemy of mindset + skillset + toolset. It cannot be just an item in a checklist.

• Like all profound things, design thinking also looks and feels simple on the surface. Boy! It is deceptive. Don't fall for it.

• Design thinking is not needed to solve all types of problems. Reap the best ROI by using it on wicked (many interdependent factors makes them seem impossible to solve) problems.

• The entry bar is low for a design thinker but that doesn't mean you will handover your venture or product or customers to someone who is not well trained. It is like giving your heart to someone who went through a three-day cardiology workshop. Choose wisely.

• Design Thinking is an iterative and continuous process. The gerund (ing) subtly implies that.

• Design thinking is depicted in colourful (and confusing) ways. There is a 5 step process, 4I process, Double diamond process and 1000 more. Whatever process you follow, hold you problem space tightly and your solution space loosely. Live and love the problem. The solution emerges by itself.

• Design Thinking as a terminology caused more harm than good because it has two words (thinking and design) in it. Some understood it as making things beautiful and some understood it as having a party with a bunch of people from office using walls and post-its. A better word for design thinking would be thinking (hu)man, machine (system) and market.

• Design thinking when done right pushes you to have bias for action, empathy for human beings involved, focus on context and no fear of failure.

• Design thinking will not be successful if we don't step out of our comfort zone and look at the broader picture. Systems Thinking is a must to understand the problem and solve the problem.

• Design thinking needs a lot of courage to thrash a ton of bad ideas and options. Getting married to ideas and holding on to human biases is a death warrant.

• Creative problem solving is very different from logical problem solving. It takes a lot of maturity to shift gears and focus on the nuances. Those who have the maturity reap the benefits and those who don't pay the price.

Creativity is not innovation and Innovation is not creativity. Yet we equate innovation with creativity and vice-versa in our casual conversations.

As a designer, I have a unique privilege to listen to variety of accusations around originality, creativity and innovation. I get to hear from every Tom, Dicky and Harry about how Steve Jobs did not create the iPhone from scratch, how Microsoft stole ideas for Windows, how Dyson's vacuuming is not original and more.

Here are some thoughts around creativity and innovation based on my experience as a creative professional 👇

• Creativity is about coming up with the big idea. Innovation is about converting the big idea into a viable business.

• Creative ideas typically spring from the minds of one person or a very small group of people. Innovation typically needs an army to realise the big idea.

• Creativity lies in the intersection of novelty and utility. Innovation lies in the intersection of ideas and execution.

• Creativity is the front end of the innovation process and execution is the back end of the innovation process. Both ideators and executors are necessary to make innovation successful.

• Innovation suffers when the "creative types" handle it in organisations. Operations is a big part of innovation success.

• Creativity is subjective and hence makes it extremely hard to measure whereas Innovation is totally measurable.

• Creativity is the price of admission.Innovation is what pays the bills.

Creative ideas can come from anyone (need not from the team within) . Putting the ideas to work as a business is what organisations must foster.

The popularity of Design Thinking comes from its ability to spot unmet and unarticulated customer needs and use the creative resources to design an appropriate solution and reap a return on its investment.

From what I see, organisations should foster more of an innovative culture as we don't lack creation of ideas, what we lack is action to make the creation possible. Innovation helps in creating value for companies and its customers.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a jargon you cannot live without in the product world. The tricky part is there are many flavours of understanding MVPs and how to make the most of it.

Building 200+ products in the past two decades compelled us to build countless MVPs day-in and day-out. Here are some reflections and observations from that experience 👇

1. MVP is not a product. It is a cog in the process of product development. Treats it like a process-in-action.

2. Building MVP is iterative and continuous. A large portion of MVP building is all about trail and error. It never gets done.

3. Pre-requisite of any MVP is the promise made to the market. It could be in the form of a landing page or a social post or an ad or just your value proposition. MVP is all about accomplishing this commitment in the simplistic form.

4. The outcome of any MVP is to understand the speed-wins and fast-fails experientially from the customers.

5. Good feedback comes from MVPs that looks neat and tidy. Reid Hoffman's note is misunderstood by most founders. Embarrassment need not be blatant. Do the heavy lifting in the back-end but make the front-end look seamless to your customers.

6. The difference between a proof of concept and MVP is viability. MVP helps you check, if the customer is willing to exchange small value in the form of currency with you for the promise you made. In other words, is the need real? Is the customer willing to pay for meeting this need?

7. MVP cannot take more than two weeks to build. If it runs into months re-evaluate your MVP specifications. If it just does that one thing you promised that's it. It must have very limited functionality.

8. MVP should appeal to your early adopter customers. If you go behind you to-be laggard customer now with MVP, your feedback gathering fails right there.

9. Don't do MVP if your industry is highly regulated (insurance, banking, drug trials etc) or your product is a moonshot idea. It doesn't work. 95% of ideas can be made into MVP. 5% is exception.

10. The aim of your MVP launch is to get customers (and not just launch it). Learning experientially from customers is easy with an MVP than without.

Building MVP starts with your promise to the market and ends with meeting the promise. Everything that stands in between this process of meeting the promise is a hurdle.

Is Design Art?
Is Art Design?
Are Design and Art not the same thing?
This is a timeless debate of our times.

Here is my perspective 👇

Art and Design are two different things. They do share some qualities with each other but at core they are two different things.

• Art is all about expression. Design is all about problem solving.

• Art is all about pushing boundaries and not having constraints. Design is all about solving within constraints.

• Art primarily works off instinct whereas Design follows a systematic and structured process.

• Art provokes thought and emotion (experience driven). Design focuses on solving a problem (solution driven).

• Art is triggered by a creative thought. Design works off a specific requirement.

• Art is perceptual. Design is rational and logical.

• Art need not have a purpose. Design must have a purpose.

• Art exists. Design has a functionality.

• Art is a perceived as a natural gift . Design can be taught and honed.

Pursuing art and pursuing design are two different careers in my view.

While art and design are distinctly different, why do we get mixed up often and why do we perceive artistic talent is a prerequisite for being a designer?

The answer is simple.

Both art and design are perceived by our (individual) human visual system. Our visual perception picks principles such as symmetry, balance, rhythm, hierarchy by default. As Sapiens we survive on these patterns and principles.

Whenever our visual perception gets triggered by attention, orderliness, aesthetics, creativity, imagination and emotions we feel very similar. Both design and art triggers that.

I am not too surprised when someone with artistic tendencies considers design as a career path by default. Slowly they will understand that design has nothing to do with art and art has nothing to do with design. It takes a nuanced eye to figure out the difference between art and design.

Bottomline is:

If you are a problem solver you will enjoy design.

If you are an explorer you will enjoy art.

Whether it is hobby or a vocation, the nature of the subject determines whether someone will stick to the stream or not.

A common question that most founders struggle with is: How do I know if we achieved product market fit (PMF)?

Here is my perspective 👇

As a maker (design + product), my life revolves around three things: Man (Customer), Machine (Product) and Market.

A thriving business typically understands their customers and their market really well. Based on the above understanding, they craft their product(s) with utmost care. It is a dynamic and a continuous process. There is no Big Bang in this process. It is a bunch of small tweaks and adjustments over a period of time that gives rise to a thriving business.

So PMF also is not a discrete magical moment in a business. It happens over a period of time.

Here is my checklist to figure out PMF for any business.

1. Before thinking about product market fit make sure you have a problem solution fit. In other words your business has found a customer problem (so painful) for which you have a solution (painkiller).

2. Is your customer bringing in new customers? In other words are your customers becoming your sales people?

3. Do you have at-least 100 paying customers right now or have done USD 100,000 in sales so far?

4. Are you profitable when you make a sale or you compromise on profitability to make a sale?

5. Is the growth killing you and you are struggling to keep up with the customer demands?

6. Your bank balance is growing and you feel like hiring marketing and sales staff as you are unable to handle the customer calls on a daily basis.

7. Your competitor's customers come to you and bring more of their friends to you.

8. You feel like overhauling your product constantly. You find ways to make it better and you do on an everyday basis and rollout the upgrades to your customers regularly.

9. Your customers come to you with more wants regularly. You feel like making new products for their wants. You try hard to satisfy the wants in your existing product and you succeed sometimes and fail sometimes.

10. Your non-customers are enquiring about your product and press wants to schedule interviews with you.

When the product is pulled out of your startup and the market responds to your barely functional product vigorously, you found your product market fit and as a founder you wonder there is so much to do and this is not it. 💪

A common question that keeps popping in the design world: What is the difference between accessible design and universal design, aren't they the same?

My perspective 👇

Accessible Design at its heart is all about considering the needs of people with disabilities whereas Universal Design is all about considering the needs of people with abilities to the greatest extent possible without needing adaptation for a specialised design. While accessible design is all about meeting the minimum requirements to achieve usability set by Disabilities act, Universal Design is all about exceeding the minimum standards to meet the needs of the greatest number of people.

All said and done, both accessible and universal design principles are concerned with addressing the needs of users beyond those considered to be average or typical.

When Universal design is done right, it benefits people with disabilities as well. For example, designing sidewalks with curb cuts, doors that automatically open based on motion benefits everyone including parents with strollers, delivery workers carrying heavy loads, when handling a patient in a wheel chair and more.

Similarly when accessible design is done right, it benefits everyone with abilities and disabilities. For example, having ability to adjust contrast and size of fonts on a phone screen allows everyone to change the text size and theme of the page as they’re interacting with it.

Universal design considers a wide spectrum of human characteristics including age, gender, stature, race, ethnicity, culture, native language and other preferences. Accessible design focuses on a certain set of disabilities like limited or no hearing, decreased or no vision etc.

The bottomline of both accessible and universal design is to bring better experience to everyone regardless of the context, abilities or situation through inclusivity.

Disclaimer: Everything said here is my personal view around how life and work will be this year and beyond based on some signs from the past few years. Covid has been an amazing catalyst to trigger these thoughts.

If you know what is coming you can be more prepared isn't it? Here are my observations around how life and work will change this year and beyond.

1. Our careers will have multiple dimensions to it. You will be a creator, performer and an investor going forward. Meta learning, first principles and ability to extract insight from everything will be celebrated.

2. You will stop hoarding books, blogs, lists and you will start embracing serendipity by algorithms. Recommendations will influence our choices.

3. Communities and Like-minded tribes will be our go to way of discovering new friends.

4. Our life will be more nomadic going forward but our urge to have a strong anchor will be even stronger. You will start valuing things that money can't buy.

5. Remote working and satellite teams will be a norm.

6. Hiring is going to be extremely difficult as there will be more freedom freaks and they will not want to be tied to a brand but they want to tied to a project.

7. Learning will be a big thing and education will not be.

8. Seeking meaning of life and forming multiple identities will be a norm.

9. Accountability and meritocracy will the metric to hire going forward. Loyalty will be a thing of past.

10. Abundance will create a lot of mental instability going forward. We will continue to seek scarcity and not settle with what we have.

Wishing you all a very happy new year my friends 🥳