Business

When I moved to Bangalore in Jan 2018, I was quite overwhelmed with the traffic. Back in my hometown : Coimbatore, we could go to any place in the city in just 15-20 mins max. In Bangalore if you want to go anywhere you’d have to plan in advance cause even to traverse 3km it would an hour, yea, you read it right, an hour. Bangalore is known to have the worst traffic in the world. Everyone in the city hated the traffic but somehow I fell in love with it. It was because I started listening to audio books while driving. I have listened to more than 50+ books over the course of two years. Everyday 1.5 hrs of my travel time is dedicated for books without which I feel my day is incomplete. During the weekends I deliberately take out car for my book time. It has now come to a point that when I am listening to an interesting book I look forward for bad traffic.

These are the books that I have listened to :

This habit taught me an important lesson about perspectives and choices, I could have been one among so many who hates traffic and who feels that it is a complete waste of time, but I felt at the end of the day it boils down to our choices on how we want to make use of our time. It has less to do with the circumstances and more to do with how we react to it. I have to say, it took some time for me cultivate the habit of listening but in time I picked it up and it pays off big time, at the very least, I don’t let traffic steal my happiness for two hours everyday.

I realised that to think different was the only way that worked for me from school times. When I joined work, the way how I proceeded with the initiatives were very different and although my approach was unconventional and time consuming, it worked. If not for my choice to stick with my principles I would not be in the place where I am today.

“Having the potential and not using it is as good as not having potential”

I learnt this from my dad who always believed that actions speaks louder than words. I had called him up to talk about new ideas, he listened to them but then questioned what was going on at my workplace and what I was doing. I explained to him about the initiatives that I was working on and told that I am meeting my deadlines and delivering the deliverables.

His next question was “Have you given your best at the place where you are working?” I couldn’t say yes cause I know I didn’t give my best, I replied that I had met my targets anyway and there were multiple constraints for me to start any initiatives of my own although I was a part of the innovations team. His remark was “So the targets were set for you, so, did you not set your own targets? Just because there are constraints, does it stop you from trying out new things? When did you start letting “external constraints” stop you from thinking or innovating? It doesn’t matter if the initiatives you come up fails or does not get accepted but what matters is that you keep coming up with something new, your constant flow of new ideas and associative innovations should make the company executives think what they can do when one person can do so much. These lines made me think and I was like “Shoot! he is right, my mind was never confined by anything” and thats what made me think different.

The next day, I jotted down a list of constraints which we face from the innovations team to figure out a workaround to come up with new ideas and test them as quickly as possible with actual users.

The most important aspects of a business is to know who our users are. This would help us define our audience

Personal Projects – School | College

This thought was embedded in mind when I built my first project : bicycle phone charger. After I built it, I installed it in my cycle and used it to charge my own phone. I was then on the lookout for more people who would find this product useful. 

Initially I used to just love the process of building something but then in time, I got to understand I was more excited when I got to know that someone is actually using my product. This taught me the importance of having a feedback cycle, I believe the speed of product development is directly proportional to time taken for feedback. The beauty of computer science is instant feedback, you know right away what you did works or not. This also gives closure to our initiatives.

Workshops – MIT Make in India

Corporate

When I joined a corporate and asked who are our end users, people usually talk about our customers but when I ask more questions, not everyone has an answer. Few of those questions are

• When did the last time you had a good conversation with your customer?
• What is the value add that your work is adding to the end customer?
• How often do you review the usage report?
• How often do you review testimonials?
• How is the work you do aligned to the vision of the company?
• What is the roadmap of the product you are working on?
• Did your manager share with the your contribution to the $ value add?

I was often directed to their respective product managers to get answers for these questions. I was quite surprised as this quite common when having conversations with my friends too. I then go to the product manager and ask the same set of questions and a few more

• What is the contribution of the team to overall revenue for the quarter / year?
• What is the target revenue for the quarter / year?
• What are the dependencies we have with the other teams?
• Are the other teams and their product managers aware of our roadmap and priorities and are we aware of theirs?
• What was our performance last year – what are we targeting this year – what is that we are doing different?

No	Product	User	Time taken	Programming language used
1	Bicycle phone charger	Vegetable cart vendorsMobile vegetable vendors	1 day
2	Math chart		1 day
3	Quadcopter		3 days
4	Phone controlled toy car
5	Home automation
6	Phone message triggered RC car
7	Currency identifier for the visually challenged
8	Project Empathise
9	Slayer exciter
10	Jus’Print
11	Jus’Print CRM
12	Drawdio
13	Waterleak censor
14	Tablet reminder
15	Adsense game
16	Pig game