If you are an incubator or accelerator operating in an emerging startup ecosystem, you know how hard it is to run a mentor-driven incubation/acceleration program when there are few mentors readily available to support the startups through their journey. Sometimes you even come across mentors who have not been where…

In the last part of this article, we discussed the advent of Indian hyperlocal startups that are executing customer tasks on-demand through a fleet of drivers and runners that are paid per task. These startups unsustainably incentivized drivers and runners to acquire and retain them, but once the incentivization decreased…

Long gone are days when the word gig was only relatable to musicians because the gig economy has arrived. A Google search for the gig economy throws up the following definition: “a labor market characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs.” …

On October 8, 2018, Kunal Bahl, one of the co-founders of Snapdeal wrote an article on LinkedIn to give a long-awaited update on Snapdeal’s current status. But why were people waiting for an update? To understand this, let’s go back to a flashback of last year when the Indian e-commerce…

Recently, someone asked a question in a Slack community of Product Managers: What’s the difference between a product and a service? At some level looks like you can convert a service to a product (e.g. use AI to answer customer calls) leading to better scaling, etc. When that happens all…

TL;DR: India has an alarming unemployability problem with less than 10% of graduating students able to make it to the jobs they studied for. An outdated, rigid education system, cultural barriers and the lack of alumni + business network support seem to be major convicts of the crime. Cclub and…

Recently, I conducted a 3-day Design Thinking workshop for a group of school students from grades 5–8 at Global City International School, Bangalore based on IDEAco’s City X Project. I gave the kids real life social problems which they had to solve by creating inventions that could be 3D printed…

I have been getting this question lately from new Product Managers about how much technical knowledge should a PM have. Frankly, I had this same question when I started out as a PM and it has been a recurring question. But why? Just go read a few PM job descriptions…

Making hard decisions is the part and parcel of being a Product Manager. We imagine great product designs and dream of it to be the next big thing until the engineering team which is working hard to bring your dream to reality brings you back to reality and crushes your…