| Tell me something about yourself |


* This is a live document and some of the questions / answers may be updated to reflect my changing opinions. Facts will stay unchanged. *

Tell me something about yourself

Short Answer:

I am really into sci-fi movies and have watched all of the good ones available there have been (80s onwards). Also, these days I am totally loving reading articles, papers and theories about machine learning, especially the transfer learning, ontology, unsupervised learning and Bayesian as well as active inference. But I am really shaky with all the maths.

Oh, and you can ask talk to me for hours about privacy, smart-phones, free software, photography and importance of narratives.

The boring answer (may be the one you wanted ?):

What are you doing these days? Anything cool?

Glad you asked!

But remember Maths being my weakness when it comes to hard core ML ?
Well, it turns out I am not particularly strong at programming either after being away from day-to-day hands-on coding for past 6 years.

I can still read and understand the code and do some exploratory analysis in Python and hack together some scripts in Shell or may be even JS, but that's about it.

That's interesting! What about some of your previous work - anything I would know or might have seen / used?

Some questions which usually come up in a job-interview setting

We are big fans of Agile. Do you have any experience working in an agile environment?

I have been working with companies who followed some versions of Agile (Scrum) methodology in one form or another. One of them called it "Factory Agile" while at another place it was just Agile.

In my limited experience over past 6 years, people mean different things when they talk about working in Agile environments.
If you ask about Scrum teams, its rituals of sprint planning, daily stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives - yes, I am intimately familiar with the same.

I agree with the intent behind the methodology - which I believe is to reduce the feedback cycle on the product being built and thereby reduce the possibility of expectation mismatch.
But as often as not, I have seen people following the rituals without really caring for the underlying intent for the same.
In cases like this, scrum / agile becomes more of a religion than anything else - which does not serve the purpose of helping create a good product - delivered as expected.

What excites you about product management?

Nothing. Not specifically about product management.

This question comes up every now and then, especially during some job interviews. What excites me is solving an interesting problem which helps people in a measurable way. If I can help people achieve something in 2 steps instead of the 7 steps they have to take currently, that excites me. Or enabling them to be able to do something they could not earlier, that excites me as well.

Such improvements in the quality of life can be brought about through many ways - including financial, policy or technological intervention. So far, my expertise and experience has been in technology and I am happy to take the technological route for this change.

Product management is just one aspect and one (loosely defined) way of helping solve such problems through technology To that end, I don't mind getting down to hacking something together myself, if required.

More to come soon...