Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ...