As a leader, the two most important things you can gift your team is pride and joy. Your team should enjoy their work and feel pride in what they worked on. These are the two fundamental premises that I base leadership on. If you are able to enable this for your team, you are a…
What do I look for, when I hire.
Interviews are a shot in the dark. You never know the state of the candidate on that one date, and deciding his fate based on how he solves a certain analytical problem, has never seemed the right thing to me. What they have done earlier: I always ask about one project that the candidate has…
Why not Store Trucks?
(image source: http://decisivecravings.com.au/grocery-shopping-for-good/) The food trucks are slowly showing up on Indian streets. People are opening up to eat gourmet or exotic (or sometimes even normal) street food out of a truck. There is one thing that I have not seen yet on Indian streets, which I am thinking, might just work. The daily staple/grocery value…
Inference and Insights
This came up in a recent meeting with the Product team at work. We were talking about data and how in recent times, we have gotten a ton of it. We were also talking about how some of this data was actionable, and some was just there. In some areas, data was just becoming very…
December trip to Chikmagalur
Well, it has been a long time since I blogged (super busy at work is the excuse this time), and what better than a travelogue to pump up things around here. Technically, the destination is not Chikmagalur per se, it is a coffee estate resort called “The Eagle Eye Holiday Home” about 42 km from…
The flip side of convenience
I had earlier written about how hyperlocal grocery delivery folks were affecting the ‘other folks’ who were actually shopping in the super markets. Some of these ‘delivery’ experts were super aggressive in picking up items before us and were trying to beat the lines etc. So while folks who found it convenient to order through…
Feel the pain – Customer Service Insight
Some of you guys might know that I have been working in the ecommerce space for the last few months. I work as a product manager in one of the top travel sites in India. One thing that has struck home hard is the importance of effective customer service. Every day, there are a handful…
Map trace by mobile
I have been thinking about this for a while. And yes, this is one of my dream product posts – there might be hints of technology possibility inside, but no means an algorithm. I will spell out a couple of use cases first. Use case1: I hail an uber from home. The pickup location is…
Ooty Road-trip Oct 2 weekend 2015
General trip notes: Mostly the roads were good – except for a short stretch from Mysore to Nanjangud – where there is road widening that is happening. Once this is finished, the road should be fully done. I took the Masinagudi route to/from Ooty – this is the 36 hairpin bend short route. The road…
Sita, Hanuman, Hulk, Spiderman …
I usually do not forward or propagate ‘forward-emails’ – emails which say that, this happened to my friends brothers sister-in-law. But this one brought with it major entertainment. This is about a little girl who went for a UKG interview in one of the premeire schools in Chennai. The Principal asks the girl to tell…