Strategy on My New Hugo Project

Hyperbolic Discounting: Why Users Quit Before They See the Value

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The “Future Self” is a Stranger

Neurologically, when you think about your “Future Self” (e.g., You in 5 years), your brain lights up in the same area as when you think about a complete stranger. We don’t empathize with our future selves. This is why we procrastinate.

Present Self: “I don’t want to do the dishes. I want to watch TV.”
Future Self: “I will have to do the dishes tomorrow.”

The Tyranny of Choice: How "Hick’s Law" is Killing Your Conversions

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Cognitive Load Problem

Imagine walking into a restaurant, starving. They hand you a 50-page menu with no pictures. Do you feel liberated? No. You feel stressed. You scan it anxiously, terrified of picking the wrong thing, and eventually just order a burger because it’s safe.

Now imagine a restaurant with a menu that has just three items: Steak, Fish, or Vegetarian. You decide in 10 seconds and feel confident.

Gall’s Law: Why "Big Bang" Launches Blow Up in Your Face

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Hubris of the Architect

We love to pretend we are architects. We draw boxes and arrows. We plan “scalable microservices” for a startup that has zero users. We think complexity is a sign of intelligence. Gall’s Law teaches us that Complexity is a result, not a starting point.

The Mechanism of Failure

Why can’t you build a complex system from scratch? Because reality is messy. When you build a simple system (e.g., a Python script that scrapes one website), you encounter real-world friction. You fix the bugs. The system “hardens.” When you try to build a complex system (e.g., a universal scraping engine for the entire web), you multiply the friction by 1,000. You have 1,000 un-hardened components interacting with each other. The number of potential failure points is not additive; it is combinatorial. The system doesn’t just fail; it behaves unpredictably.

The Pareto Principle: Identify the "Vital Few" and Ignore the "Trivial Many"

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Myth of Linear Effort

We grow up believing in a 1:1 relationship between Input and Output.

If I study 1 hour, I learn 1 unit.
If I study 2 hours, I learn 2 units.

In software and business, this is a lie. The relationship is non-linear (Power Law). A single feature (like “Stories” in Instagram) can drive more engagement than the other 50 features combined.

Applying 80/20 to Product Management

1. The Feature Trap (Bloatware) Open your analytics. Look at your navigation bar. I guarantee that 80% of your users only click on 2 or 3 buttons. The other 15 buttons are just gathering dust.

The $300 Million Button: Why Friction is the Enemy of Revenue

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The “Greedy Marketer” Trap

As Product Managers, we are data-greedy. We want the user’s email. We want their phone number. We want them to create a profile so we can send them newsletters and retarget them with ads. We convince ourselves that “Registration” is good for the user. “It’s for their security!” we say.

But to a user, a “Register” form represents Work and Commitment.

Work: I have to think of a password. I have to verify my email.

The Milkshake Mistake: Why Your Competitor Isn't Who You Think It Is

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Demographics Trap

Most Product Managers start with a “Persona.”

Meet Dave. He is 34. He lives in Seattle. He works in Tech.

This data is factual, but it is useless. Knowing Dave’s age doesn’t tell you why he bought a newspaper this morning. Did he buy it to read the news? Or did he buy it because he needed something to hide behind on the subway to avoid talking to his neighbor?

The Peak-End Rule: Why Users Ignore the Average and Remember the Finale

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Two Selves

Daniel Kahneman argues that we have two selves:

The Experiencing Self: Lives in the moment. Feels every second of frustration or joy.
The Remembering Self: Keeps the score.

The Remembering Self is a tyrant. It deletes 99% of the experience and only keeps the highlights. Specifically, it keeps the Peak (the highest emotional point) and the End. If you have a 5-star dinner but the waiter is rude when bringing the bill (The End), you will remember the dinner as “terrible.”

The Kano Model: Why Features "Expire" and How to Stay Ahead

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Gravity of Expectations

Product Management would be easy if customer expectations stayed static. But they don’t. Customer satisfaction is a Hedonic Treadmill.

The moment you ship a revolutionary feature, the clock starts ticking. Competitors copy it. Users get used to it. The magic fades. To understand this lifecycle, we use the Kano Model.

The 3 Categories of Features

1. The Basics (Must-Haves)

Definition: These are non-negotiable.
The Trap: You get Zero Credit for doing them well.

Product superiority is not a strategy. It’s a vanity metric.

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a famous quote by Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape: “There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.”

As Product Managers, we are trained to focus on the “Unbundle” phase—creating specific, best-in-class solutions for specific problems (like Slack for chat, Zoom for video, Jira for tickets).

But as you move into Executive Leadership (Director/CPO), the pendulum swings. The P&L demands efficiency, and efficiency almost always comes from Bundling.

You aren’t a Product Leader until you can manage a P&L.

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the early stages of a Product Manager’s career, success is measured by output: features shipped, bugs fixed, and velocity maintained. But as you ascend to Principal, Director, or CPO roles, the scoreboard changes.

Your code doesn’t matter anymore. Your P&L impact does.

The most successful product leaders today act less like visionaries and more like capital allocators. They understand that every line of code is an investment that must return more than its cost of capital.

The Baggage Claim Strategy: Managing the Psychology of "The Wait"

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Houston Experiment

The Houston Airport story is the foundational case study for the Psychology of Queuing. The airport realized that the objective variable (Time) mattered less than the subjective variable (Perception). When passengers were standing at the carousel staring at an empty belt, they were bored and anxious. They felt ignored. When they were walking, they were “working” toward a goal. They felt in control.

The Maister Principles

David Maister, an expert on business management, formulated several laws of waiting:

The Cobra Effect: Why Your KPIs Are Creating the Wrong Behavior

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Law of Unintended Consequences

The Cobra story is a classic example of what economists call a Perverse Incentive—an incentive that produces a result contrary to the intentions of its designers.

In the world of Product Management, we live and die by metrics. We set OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). We give bonuses based on numbers. But if you pick the wrong number, you don’t just get no results; you get bad results.

The Hole in Your Data: How Survivorship Bias is Killing Your Growth

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Missing Data

The story of Abraham Wald and the WW2 bombers is the perfect metaphor for modern Product Management. The Generals made a logical error: They assumed the data they had was the entire data. They forgot about the data they didn’t have: The planes lying at the bottom of the ocean.

In SaaS, your “Ocean” is your Churn Rate.

The “Power User” Trap

We love our Power Users. They answer our surveys. They join our beta programs. They rave about us on Twitter. So, we build features for them.

The $1.50 Hot Dog Strategy: When Losing Money is the Most Profitable Move

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Famous Threat

In 2009, Costco’s then-CEO came to the founder, Jim Sinegal, and said, “Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for $1.50 anymore. We are losing our shirts.” Sinegal replied with the now-famous line: “If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.”

So, they built their own hot dog factories just to keep the price down. They refused to break the $1.50 price point.

The Swiss Army Knife Syndrome: Why Great Products Die from Feature Bloat

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Complexity Creep

Open Microsoft Word. Look at the toolbar. How many of those hundreds of icons have you clicked in the last year? Maybe 10?

Now open Google Docs. It has perhaps 20% of Word’s features, yet it dominates collaboration. Why?

Because it suffers less from Feature Bloat.

Bloat happens slowly. No PM wakes up and says, “Let’s make our product confusing today.” It happens one rational decision at a time.

The $1 Million Mistake: When "Custom Features" Kill Your Product Strategy

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Siren Song of the Enterprise Deal

In the early stages of a B2B startup, revenue is oxygen. When a massive enterprise client (a bank, a telco, a government agency) shows interest, it is intoxicating. It validates your existence.

But these “Elephants” or “Whales” rarely buy off-the-rack. They demand tailoring.

“We need this specific report format.”
“We need an on-premise deployment option.”
“We need this button to be blue, not green.”

The Legacy Code Trap: Why New Rules Crashed India's Biggest Airline

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Observation

We are witnessing an operational meltdown in Indian aviation. Flights are cancelled, pilots are exhausted, and passengers are stranded. The media is blaming the dense fog. But if you look closer, the fog was just the trigger. The gun was loaded by the new DGCA Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) norms introduced in January 2024.

IndiGo, a machine built for precision, suddenly looked like it didn’t know how to run an airline. Why? Because the underlying logic of their resource allocation broke overnight.