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I first stumbled upon blockchains and cryptocurrencies in 2015 and it immediately piqued my interest. What sorcery was this thing called Bitcoin? why was it getting so much press? Why did it have any value at all?

As I entered the dark crypto world — I met some otherwise rational people going crazy about anything that had to do with blockchains and bitcoins. They talked endlessly and fanatically about mining, rigs, GPUs, blockchain apps, decentralization etc. I…

The past few months have been pretty busy at work. We’ve started an exercise where we are evaluating a product — currently manufactured in our European & North American factories — to be manufactured in our Asian factories to serve the regional markets.

There have been several meetings, planning sessions, and discussions to plan every aspect of the manufacturing move. For instance, How many units might we sell out of this factory? How long will zero to starting up production take? What the supply chain/sourcing strategy will look like? And more.

This has taken the bulk of my brain cycles…

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If you ever work for a large corporation with complicated matrixed org structures, you’ll broadly find two types of people

Type 1: People that wait for instructions, and wait for things to happen — They’ll tell you all the reasons why something cannot be done

Type 2: People who want to make things happen, try different things, find out all the ways how something can…

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“How should we price this product?” — somebody posed the question in our weekly product meeting. I had no idea.

It was my very first product launch and I had no experience pricing a real product before. The closest I had gotten to “pricing” something was at a Product Positioning and Pricing course at business school — but again, that was coursework based on hypotheticals, and this was the real world.

The idea was to price the…

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Until I landed my first PM job, I had never really interviewed anyone.

The first time I interviewed someone was alongside a User Experience researcher (who did it for a living). I was a new PM trying to validate a product idea that we thought was exciting and solved a big pain point for people. Our target market was small business owners, so we cold-called a bunch of small business owners and set up meetings.

In sum, we…

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All of us know that most plants need water to survive. i.e. if you don’t water your plants, they die. But that inference is not exactly accurate. Here’s what really happens:

If you don’t give the plant any water, the plant dies.

With too little water, the plant grows for a little but then dies eventually

You water it just right, the plant flourishes and grows.

You Water it too often, the plant starts wilting.

Too much…

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When I landed my first Product Management job, I was happy, ecstatic, and proud. But I was also nervous — because I had never really done the job before.

In my previous company, I was a software developer and we never had a Product Manager on the team. (This was before Product Management became cool) .

After my Software developer gig and now fresh off the MBA press, I wanted to get into…

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When Product Managers are asked what some of their most risky assumptions are, they often cite market risk assumptions or technology risk assumptions. This is what the vast majority of PMs spend time thinking about and validating.

• Market Risk — the assumption that there is meaningful demand for the product you are building
• Technology Risk — that the core value proposition (that eliminates the market risk) can indeed be built…