Cloud

While I ponder on 2012 and plan for 2013, I always keep the regret minimization framework (watch the short video clip above) in back of my mind. Of course luck plays a huge part in people's success, but we owe it a lot to Jeff Bezos. We probably wouldn't have seen Amazon.com and we most certainly would not have seen EC2. No one predicted anything about Amazon being a key cloud player. A few years back Twitter didn't exist and Facebook was limited to college kids. I do make plans but I have stopped predicting since I will most certainly get it wrong . "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." - Dwight Eisenhower I use regret minimization framework not only as a long-term thinking tool but also to make decisions in short-term. It helps me assess, prioritize, and focus on right opportunities. While long-term thinking is a good thing, I strongly believe in setting short term goals, meeting them, and more importantly cherishing them. If you're not minimiz...

During his recent visit to the office of 37 Signals, Jeff Bezos said, "to be consistently objective, one has to be objectively inconsistent." I find this perspective very refreshing that is applicable to all things and all disciplines in life beyond just product design. As a product designer you need to have a series of point of views (POV) that would be inconsistent when seen together but each POV at any given time will be consistently objective. This is what design thinking, especially prototyping is all about. It shifts a subjective conversation between people to an objective conversation about a design artifact. As I have blogged before I see data scientists as design thinkers . Most data scientists that I know of have knowledge-curse. I would like them to be  consistently objective by going through the journey of analyzing data without any pre-conceived bias. The knowledge-curse makes people commit more mistakes . It also makes them defend their POV instead of looking f...