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Writing
- It’s really salty! (opens in a new tab)
A childhood habit of sneaking raw salt became the way I think about presence, patience and decisions you can't undo. This is about being the grain that brings out what's already there.
I treated every culinary misstep as a personal failure, a reflection of some fundamental inadequacy.
But now, I’ve learned to taste and sit with it. To appreciate it as it is, even when it falls short of ideal. Life operates on the same principle, I’ve discovered. Some days arrive bland and uninspiring. Others overwhelm with their intensity. But even in imperfection, there is richness. Even in imbalance, there is flavor worth savoring. Presence matters more than perfection.
Salt also taught me about irreversibility. Unlike most ingredients, you cannot remove salt once added. There’s no going back, no undoing. This lesson has profound implications beyond the kitchen. Some words, once spoken, cannot be unspoken. Some decisions, once made, cannot be unmade. Salt taught me to act with intention, to taste along the way, to proceed with both confidence and care.
- Humidity Taught Me More About People Than I Expected (opens in a new tab)
One humid summer stripped the polish off everyone around me, and I started noticing who stays kind when things get uncomfortable.
Your eyeliner smudges. Your hair frizzes. Your patience thins.
And suddenly, everyone around you becomes… real.
The person on the metro dabbing their forehead with a wrinkled napkin. The mother in the park trying to soothe a cranky toddler while juggling a half-spilled juice box. The couple walking together but holding hands at arm’s length for a breeze that never arrives.
In that stickiness and surrender, I began to see something I hadn’t before: undeniable humanness.
Humidity makes you uncomfortable, but it also makes you observant. It slows you down just enough to notice the way someone gently makes space in a crowded elevator, or how a stranger offers their umbrella without drama.
Before, I used to admire the polished. Now, I admire the people who stay kind when the weather is not.
- Fifteen Minutes of a Smile: A Photo Studio Time Capsule (opens in a new tab)
A passport-photo errand sent me back to the same wobbly stool I sat on at five, still unsure what to do with my face.
I had gone for a passport picture. A simple errand. But somehow, those fifteen minutes folded time like a well-kept sari.
The lights were still harsh. The stool still wobbled. The white backdrop was still slightly stained at the corners. And the photographer still said, “Chin up. No smile. Just relax,” as if that exact combination had ever worked on anyone. I sat there, stiff in my shirt, blinking too often, thinking too hard about how not to look like I was thinking.
It brought me back to the first time I ever sat in front of that white sheet. I was five. My mother had braided my hair so tight I couldn’t move my forehead. My shoes didn’t touch the floor. The studio smelled of film rolls and talcum powder.
- Tongue-Tied and Tender: A Love Letter to My Languages (opens in a new tab)
Tamil at home, Telugu on the street, English at school, Hindi from the movies, then Pilani, Bombay and Chennai. This is how I stopped trying to live in just one language.
I spoke less, but I meant more. I dropped the performative edge. I stopped overthinking sentence structure and started listening to tone. Pilani taught me to feel in multiple tongues. It was the birthplace of stillness in my speech.
Cue: Bombay.
Bombay didn’t ask me to speak. It dared me. The city is fast. It snaps. It doesn’t wait for your words to line up in single file. You either keep up or get drowned in the honking. Here, language is style. Attitude. Sass. A one-liner on Marine Drive. A sarcastic quip in the middle of a fight. My English sharpened, my Hindi got bolder, and even my Tamil learned to roll its eyes. Bombay taught me speed. Taught me sass. Taught me how to end a sentence with a smirk.
- The snore… (opens in a new tab)
A viral thread about a husband's snores on Spotify made me think about the sounds of the people we love, and how quickly we lose them.
But it’s the ambient, background, barely-noticed sounds that hit the hardest. The shuffle of slippers. The way they cleared their throat before speaking. The hiccup in their laughter. The way they existed in noise.
And we let that go first. Always. Because sound is slippery. It doesn’t stay. Not unless we trap it.
Which brings me back to the Spotify snores.
Forty thousand people aren’t just looking for white noise. They’re looking for someone. Or something. Something lost, something almost forgotten, something that lives in frequencies and vibrations instead of pixels and text.
- Finding My Voice: A Product Manager’s Journey from Echo to Original at Ketto (opens in a new tab)
Part 3 of my "Chapter and Verse" series on Austin Kleon's Show Your Work. I dropped the PM jargon, started writing story-first PRDs and found my team listened more.
Welcome back, fellow product adventurers! If you’ve been following my “Chapter and Verse: A Product Manager’s Odyssey” series, you know we’re diving deep into Austin Kleon’s “Show Your Work” faster than a developer deploys to production. Today’s episode? Chapter 3: “Find Your Voice.”
Spoiler alert: It’s not about taking singing lessons to nail those product pitch presentations (although that wouldn’t hurt).Also I got lost among the sweetboxes of Diwali.
The Echo Chamber of Product Management
You know that moment when you catch yourself saying “leverage synergies” or “paradigm shift” in a meeting and wonder, “Who am I becoming?” Yeah, that was me six months ago at Ketto. I was speaking fluent Product Manager™️, but something felt off. I was an echo, not a voice.
- Chapter 2 of “Show Your Work” and How It’s Revolutionizing My Approach at Ketto (opens in a new tab)
Part 2 of the series. We ran sessions where everyone pretended to know nothing about the product, and the fresh questions changed what we built.
Replace “dangerous” with “innovative,” and you’ve got yourself a product management philosophy that would make even Steve Jobs raise an eyebrow (and possibly steal it).
From Scenius to Amateur Hour: A Ketto Case Study
Remember our “Genius Bar” from last week? Well, it’s gotten an upgrade. We now call it the “Amateur Hour” (trademark pending; yes, we serve drinks). The rules? Everyone must approach each problem as if they know nothing about it.
Here’s how it played out:
Our UX designer pretended she’d never seen our app before. Result? She spotted 5 UX issues we’d all become blind to.
Our data analyst approached our metrics as if he’d just learned what numbers were. He questioned why we track certain KPIs, leading to a complete revamp of our analytics dashboard.
I pretended I didn’t know what crowdfunding was.
- Finding My Scenius: A Product Manager’s Quest for Collective Genius (opens in a new tab)
Part 1 of the series. Instead of trying to be the all-knowing PM, I built a circle of designers, analysts, engineers and support folks to think with.
Chapter 1 of “Show Your Work” and How It’s Transforming My Product Playground at Ketto
Move over, lone wolf product managers! There’s a new pack in town, and it’s called a “scenius.” No, it’s not a rare species of PM that can understand developers’ jokes. It’s something far more powerful, and I’m on a mission to find mine.
Welcome to “Chapter and Verse: A Product Manager’s Odyssey,” where I’m deep-diving into Austin Kleon’s “Show Your Work” faster than a sprint planning session on Red Bull. Why? Well, let’s just say my product roadmap was starting to look more like a product cul-de-sac.( Shout out to Gilmore Girl’s please ❤️️)
Today’s release notes? Chapter 1: “Find a Scenius.” Spoiler alert: It’s not about discovering a long-lost ancient Greek philosopher who predicted the rise of agile methodology.
- How Checklist PRDs Flipped My Product Management at Ketto (opens in a new tab)
I swapped our giant PRD template for a checklist that grows with each phase. Kickoffs got livelier and features shipped faster.
Then, our engineer pointed out a way to integrate it with our payment gateway which saved us weeks of work. The result? A stronger feature that was ready faster, all because everyone had a chance to contribute right from the start.
2. Rapid Iteration on User Feedback 🚀
Another big win? Flexibility. The checklist PRD let us pivot much more quickly based on user feedback. While developing the “Fundraiser Updates” feature, we got key feedback from some of our most active fundraisers mid-development. Normally, I’d have had to rewrite large chunks of the PRD to incorporate that feedback, which, honestly, would have probably led to us ignoring it.
But with the checklist PRD? We just added a new item: “Add video update option based on user feedback.” That tiny addition kicked off a series of discussions, and suddenly, we were building a way more engaging feature.
- How a Simple “Add to Cart” Feature Transformed Ketto’s Fundraising (opens in a new tab)
Donors wanted to help more than one person but had to pick favourites. We borrowed the e-commerce cart and let them support several causes at once.
- Ditch the PRD Template and Embrace the PRD Checklist: A Product Manager's Journey (opens in a new tab)
Why I moved from long PRDs to phase-based checklist PRDs at Ketto, and what changed in collaboration.
- Personalizing Donation Slabs to Boost Revenue: A Product Manager's Journey at Ketto (opens in a new tab)
Replaced fixed donation amounts with persona-based slabs.
No baseline, period or test design is stated for the donation and conversion write-up.
- How We Boosted Ketto's GMV with a Simple Tipping Feature (opens in a new tab)
An optional tip in the donation flow, with an opt-out added after feedback. No revenue figure is published.