Discover more from Harmony
I would like to utilize this first post to write about who, why, what, and for whom. Specifically, who am I, why am I writing, what do I intend to write about, and for whom is this intended.
Who?
I am a product of my experiences...
Edited in 2023: I am an entrepreneur and a product consultant. I help B2B SaaS companies improve their customer experience and understand their customers. I also build products.
Before this, I was a Product Manager in a growth-stage tech company and worked as an engineer. I worked across company sizes ranging from 30 to 76,000 employees. Having lived on three continents, I’ve had the opportunity to absorb varied cultures, cuisines, and working styles. Lastly, I’ve found it fun to immerse myself in music as a keyboardist in bands, Krav Maga martial arts, Salsa Rueda or hip-hop dancing, and reading social psychology.
What’s with “Harmony”?
The idea of “Harmony” describes my interests.
Harmony is my ideal state. I'm passionate about and am working towards harmonizing technological advancements for social impact for a wholesome, harmonious society. My career has allowed me to thrive in the harmony of business and technology. I seek mind-heart harmony by playing music on the synthesizer, mind-body harmony by practicing Krav Maga or Salsa Rueda, and mind-world harmony by immersing myself in social psychology.
Why?
I’ve found reading the learnings of others who’ve experienced something I am attempting useful. Along the way, I’ve also synthesized such reads and my learnings into new tips and tricks. I’ve often found myself repeating the same advice to multiple aspirants or sharing the same list of books, courses, or frameworks… a good problem to have! These posts are my way of writing things down to make sharing my learning easier.
What?
Three things I can think of today to share are
Career search tactical tips and tricks I found useful when switching one’s career to Product Management, changing industry, and changing country. All three together.
Learnings of customer behavior through a series of launches to reduce customer support tickets by almost half across 100,000s of customers.
My takeaways from books or courses I found helpful to be more productive or improve my career. I would focus on takeaways instead of reviews or summaries since that will be the selective information that my perspective could hold in memory.
For Whom?
You might find value from reading my posts if my experiences are similar to what you are looking to do for the first time or do better when you do it next.
Tactical tips I learnt and some frameworks for parts of the end-to-end career switch journey might help if you are looking to switch careers, looking to switch into Product Management, or switch into a new PM role.
My growth-stage startup career phase necessitated self-learning and experimentation. The resulting learnings might help if you want to improve your understanding of customers in general or improve customer experience for your product.
The other diverse posts might be intriguing if you are into social psychology, music, martial arts, weight lifting, salsa, productivity hacks, or non-profits.
Credits
My friend Nikitha Suryadevara shared her learnings from 5 years of blogging, which were invaluable in helping me understand where and how to start. You can check her substack at La Femme Nikitha and blogs at La Femme Nikitha – product manager. nerd & bibliophile when not fighting crime.
I did tertiary research, via This Is Exactly What Your First Blog Post Should Be About, and I found it very helpful to put a skeleton for my first post.
What’s next?
If you find any of these topics interesting, stick around for a few posts by subscribing to my substack newsletter.