firesofmay

There is a saying that I've heard as I grew up - "The answer lies in the question itself". It took me some time to get it but recently I saw it at a whole new level. But before I do that, let's talk about...

I used ChatGPT and Midjourney to write a short story and share how I wrote it, what were the challenges I faced and my learnings from the experience.

Intro In this blog post, I have jotted down some of my methodologies, tips & tools to stay productive. Do remember that the following took several years to become part of my daily workflow. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t follow everything. Pick things that make sense to you and improve as you go along. Finally, if you have any questions or doubts, feel free to ping me on my twitter. I’ll be happy to answer your questions. Basic Navigation * You should know these quick navigation shor

Intro Recently, Shishir Mehrotra (Co-Founder & CEO at Coda) shared some of his insights at a TPF webinar named: Lessons for Product Leaders. In this webinar, he covered various topics. However, I’ll talk in detail about two of the topics that he touched: 1. Measuring the performance of your product team. 2. Conducting meetings effectively. About Shishir Shishir Mehrotra is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coda. Earlier, he served as the Vice President of Product and Engineering for Youtube/Vide

Intro If you are looking to apply for a PM interview, chances are you'll be asked to solve an Estimation type of question. For example: * Calculate the number of queries answered by Google per second? * How many dentists are there in New York? * Estimate the number of passengers arriving in SF airport everyday. * Estimate the number of WhatsApp chats occurring in India. Here's a broad framework on how to solve such questions: 1. Clarify the scope of the question 2. Create the main equ

Intro Any company, especially startups facing issues in controlling their churn rate, is a good problem to be solved. It means you have enough traction, but something is not right somewhere along the user's journey. What is Churn? It is the percentage of users who stopped using your product/service during a particular time frame. Customer Churn = (Number of deactivated users in a time frame) / (Number of total users in a time frame) So if you had 1000 users at the start of the quarter and

Intro If you have been interviewing for a Product Manager role (or have done that in the past), you must have come across product improvement questions. Today I’d like to share a case study of how I would improve WhatsApp (Assuming I am one of the PMs there). Idea is to present how I would think about the problem and come up with a set of possible improvements along the way. Let’s get started! WhatsApp Intro Before I dive deep into WhatsApp, I’d like to share my understanding of the WhatsAp

Inbox Crazy Once I came back from a week-long holiday. I opened my Gmail — 500+ new emails sitting in my inbox. “Inbox zero” status — Gone! I set aside half a day to triage them. 80% of them are newsletters, company updates, marketing emails. 15% are transactional emails like invoices, bank notification, order confirmation, etc., while a handful of them require me to reply to them (CA asking me for some document, someone reached out to me, etc.). The above incident has happened to me too many

Intro Recently one of the underdog Bollywood celebrities - Sushant Singh Rajput committed suicide. Why he did it still being speculated, another heated debate that was doing the rounds was how nepotism in the film industry doesn’t promote any new talent - Like Sushant. It is difficult for newcomers like him to defend themselves. At the same time, sons and daughters of known actors have it easy due to their filmy background. While I don’t disagree with it, some people might think it is the faul