New tools don’t just make work faster. They eat layers. Not industries. Not entire professions overnight. Layers inside them.

AI is the first technology that’s eating many layers at once, across almost everything humans do on a computer. That’s why this moment feels different. And unsettling.

The past, when tools ate one layer at a time

Historically, technology moved upward slowly. It removed a layer, then paused. Humans adapted in the gap.

Before calculators, “computer” was a job title. Humans did arithmetic for a living. Calculators didn’t kill mathematics. They reduced the need for human calculators. Mathematics moved upward, from computation to proof, abstraction, and theory. One layer disappeared, the rest remained.

Architects once drew every line by hand. AutoCAD removed manual drafting, geometric repetition, and physical precision work. But architecture still required judgment, safety intuition, tradeoffs, and responsibility for real buildings. One layer gone.

Photography once involved darkrooms, chemicals, and physical manipulation. Photoshop removed that layer. It did not remove taste, framing, storytelling, or intent.

Excel removed handwritten ledgers and manual reconciliation. Accounting still required interpretation, compliance, ethics, and trust.

Layer by layer, slowly. This is how humans stayed comfortable. There was time to re-anchor identity.

The present, AI eats stacks, not layers

AI breaks this pattern.

Instead of removing one layer and stopping, AI keeps climbing up the abstraction stack. In one leap, it can calculate, design, code, write, compose, generate images and video, model systems, and explain its own output.

And it does this across domains, not one profession at a time.

This isn’t “AI replaces programmers” or “AI replaces designers”.

It’s this: AI removes entire intermediate layers of human work wherever tasks are digital, repeatable, and internally judgeable.

That’s why the anxiety feels universal.

What AI consistently eats

Across industries, AI eats work with common traits. The input can be described in language. The output can be evaluated without touching reality. The feedback loop is fast. The cost of being wrong is tolerable. The domain is already digitized.

That’s why AI replaces calculators, drafting, first pass design, boilerplate coding, rough analysis, and initial creative output. This is obviously moving towards AI pushing out production ready output across industries and roles.

Not because it understands. Because the loop is closed.

Why this feels unprecedented

Earlier tools stopped at execution. AI doesn’t.

For the first time, humans are watching a tool climb through execution, synthesis, pattern recognition, and partial judgment all at once.

So the old comfort story, “this has happened before”, only works if we’re honest. The speed and breadth are new. And the fear is rational.

The future, fewer layers, heavier humans

AI doesn’t remove humans from systems. It concentrates them.

Fewer people will define objectives, approve outputs, design systems, absorb risk, and own consequences. But those people will carry more weight.

The middle layers, the buffers that once absorbed ambiguity, will thin out.

Some things still resist automation:

• Ground truth, what’s actually happening in the real world
• Accountability, who is responsible when things go wrong
• Values, what should or should not exist
• Power and incentives, who benefits and who pays the cost
• Meaning, why something exists at all

AI can simulate conversations about these. It cannot own them.

Reality always snaps responsibility back to a human.

So what should engineers, designers, sales teams and other knowledge workers do now?

Not learn prompts. Not outwork AI. And definitely not panic pivot.

The answer is quieter and harder.

Stop optimizing for tools and start optimizing for judgment. Tools are now ephemeral. Languages, frameworks, design software, even models will keep changing faster than humans can specialize. What compounds instead is judgment, taste, intuition about tradeoffs, and the ability to say “this is wrong” even when it looks correct.

Move closer to reality, not further into abstraction. AI thrives in abstraction. Humans retain leverage near users, constraints, consequences, and messy reality. Engineers talking to users. Designers understanding user incentives. Creators caring about outcomes, not artifacts. Distance from reality is where layers disappear fastest.

Shift identity from tasks to outcomes. The old identities were “I write code”, “I design screens”, “I produce assets”. The new identity is “I own whether this works”. Ownership includes defining scope, handling failure, explaining tradeoffs, and absorbing responsibility. AI can help execute. It cannot carry blame.

Become fluent across layers, not perfect in one. The future rewards people who can understand systems end to end, translate between technical, human, and business concerns, notice second order effects, and recognize when something is technically correct but practically wrong. This isn’t about becoming a shallow generalist. It’s about being able to hold the whole when layers collapse.

Let go of effort as proof of worth. For a long time, struggle was how many of us proved intelligence and legitimacy. AI removes visible struggle. That can feel like asking whether we were ever valuable. The answer is yes, but not because of the effort. Value was never in the suffering. It was in the judgment earned through it.

Redefine success as calm competence in uncertainty. The future isn’t about always being ahead. It’s about staying oriented as tools change, remaining useful as roles blur, and not freezing when certainty disappears. People who stay calm, curious, and responsible in ambiguity will quietly become indispensable.

A personal, honest note

This transition will hurt some people. Some roles will shrink. Some paths will close. That doesn’t make the fear irrational.

But history suggests something else too. When layers disappear, what remains is the human capacity to judge, decide, and take responsibility.

AI isn’t ending human work. It’s ending the idea that doing one narrow thing well is enough.

What’s left is heavier. But it’s also more deeply human.

The post What Happens When AI Eats the Middle of Your Career appeared first on The Product Diary.

Search was a feature. Recommendations was a feature. Analytics, autosave, onboarding flows. All began as differentiations and then slowly became invisible infrastructure.

Now we are entering the next phase of that pattern, where reasoning becomes the new user experience layer.

From queries to understanding

Software historically had hardcoded patterns that users could trigger. You click on a button and the hardcoded path initiates a network request to a pre-built api which fetches the results from a pre-defined DB query and responds with the results which are shown by the frontend. For the end user, they simply clicked on a button and were shown the result.

Now with reasoning models embedded into software products, software is beginning to do something different. It understands what the user means and instead of being dependent on a pre-built path, it can create it’s own to reach the end goal across all levels i.e. model (DB operations), view (frontend) and controller (logic). You no longer need to explicitly define every rule, sequence or exception. You just need to describe your intent and the system can figure out the rest.

This shift from hardcoded data flows to dynamic data flows based on LLM interpretation is subtle but seismic. It means that software can now help users because it just became a ‘thinker’ and not just a ‘doer’.

The UX layer we never saw coming

For years, UX has been about how users interact with software i.e. buttons, flows, screens and words. Now UX is becoming about how software interacts with itself, how it connects ideas, fills in missing steps and makes sense of ambiguous instructions.

Reasoning is the invisible UX, the part that ensures the user never feels lost, confused or constrained. Guided by a thinking software assistant handholding the user at every step. It’s not just smart, it’s contextually aware. It doesn’t just respond, it understands.

When software can reason, the interface doesn’t have to over explain itself. Because the product knows what the user means.

You are no longer just designing interfaces. You are designing intelligence. How you product perceives, interprets and makes sense of what it encounters. In other words, you are giving your product a mind to let the software think alongside the user.

From Interactions to Intent

Traditional UX design assumed users would articulate everything precisely. Click here, type this, select that.

But humans don’t operate that way naturally. We think in fragments, in goals and intents. The reasoning layer bridges the gap. It transforms rough intent based input into coherent action. It’s the layer that says

I know what you are trying to do. Let me handle it.

That’s not just another interaction. That’s collaboration between your users and your intelligence layer.

The disappearing interface

As reasoning gets embedded deeper into products, UX will begin to disappear in the best possible way. Users won’t have to learn the product. The product will learn the user. Software will quietly reason it’s way to the next right thing. And that quietness, that seamlessness. That is the new UX.

The next frontier for builders

For builders, this means thinking differently about experience design. UX can no longer stop at screens, flows and feedback. It has to extend into how the product thinks, how it explains, adapts and anticipates.

The reasoning layer is now part of product design. It shapes how the product feels, not just how it looks. The design question is no longer “What should the user do next?”. It is “What should the product do next?”.

Closing thought

We have spent decades teaching users how to think like software. Now it’s time to build software that thinks like users. That’s when reasoning stops being a backend feature and becomes the new UX.

The post Reasoning is the new UX: What builders need to know appeared first on The Product Diary.

Early in my career, I could write complex algorithms with ease, but when it came to speaking in a meeting, my brain froze.

If someone asked for my opinion, I ran it through ten mental filters before saying anything, and usually by the time I had found the perfect sentence, the conversation had already moved on.

I wasn’t shy exactly. I just didn’t want to look foolish.

So I stayed in the background. I took notes. I let my work speak for itself.

It felt safe, but over time I realised that silence comes with its own cost. You miss chances to contribute, to connect, and sometimes to grow.

In a moment of desperation to change this, I signed up for improv sessions. It’s a form of theater that artists and creative people seemed to love doing, not science nerds.

It was hell. Every part of me resisted. I hated being put on the spot, hated the silly games, hated feeling like I had no script to rely on. I learnt things about my own behaviours that I didn’t like. But something shifted. Improv pushed me out of my head and into the moment. I began to express myself more freely, and even when my ideas were messy or imperfect, I learned to stay in the conversation instead of retreating.

Later, when I began heading a product team, I started noticing the same pattern I had struggled with. Tech people went quiet when they were stuck or unsure. Not because they didn’t care, but because speaking up felt risky. Brilliant minds, but introverted. Meetings were efficient but flat. Updates were given, but ideas rarely built on each other.

Delay and deadlocks are sometimes caused by a culture of punishment when things go wrong. If you treat people like machines and shame or punish them for bringing issues to your attention, the problems will still arise in the future but will never bubble up because people will be scared about the punishment. When someone gets stuck, they would rather go silent for days than risk asking for help.

So I tried an experiment. Every Monday, we booked a conference room and started the week with a 30-minute improv session.

It wasn’t about being funny; it was about learning to be present, listen, and express more.

At first it was awkward. Some people rolled their eyes. Others played along but kept their walls up.

But slowly, something changed.

We began to look forward to Mondays. We started the week with laughter and lightness. People opened up. Conversations flowed. When roadblocks came, they were surfaced early. And when someone had a half-baked idea, others jumped in to help shape it instead of letting it die in silence. They began gaining the confidence to communicate, to present to a room full of people. They began to communicate and do the improv exercises in a language they were comfortable with (Hindi or Marathi) instead of being bogged down and forcing themselves to communicate in English which was not their language of origin. As long as the communication was clear, language didn’t matter. So we became language agnostic and were compatible with all 3 languages as a team. Sometimes the team’s communication pathways themselves are blocked and your job becomes being a people person more than a tech person and removing whatever seems to obstruct the flow of communication. And sometimes, that obstruction can also be your behaviour which might need some refining.

Technical issues need debugging. So do teams.

And sometimes the fix isn’t a new tool, a new KPI, or a new process. Sometimes it is simply creating a space, however small, where people feel safe enough to speak up, collaborate, and be a little imperfect together.

The post Debugging your Team appeared first on The Product Diary.

Kavi hadn’t typed anything new.

But the silence felt thick. Like a breath held too long.

Outside, Pune moved with slow, errorless grace. The traffic systems no longer faltered. Parks were always clean. Public transport arrived exactly 18 seconds early, then waited – patiently, obediently.

Every person had enough.

Enough food. Enough housing. Enough warmth.

But something was missing.

Not from the infrastructure.

From the air.

The shift hadn’t come by vote or rebellion.

It had arrived gradually, like condensation on glass – barely visible until your reflection disappears.

By the late 2040s, work was ceremonial. The state issued “Digital Income” to all – automatically, effortlessly. There was no job application, no interview, no boss.

On paper, it was equality perfected.

But Arjun had noticed something.

The same companies that had pioneered full automation…

…were the ones managing the distribution systems.

The biometric identity chains.

The citizen data credit systems.

They no longer sold products.

They managed people.

It wasn’t socialism.

It was containment.

Designed so no one could fall – but also so no one could rise.

The people were calm. They had their routines: daily yoga, AI-curated learning playlists, nature walks, emotional check-ins.

But what no one talked about anymore… was power.

It had simply drifted upward, quietly, until the sky held it – too far to see.

That morning, Kavi finally wrote:

“Equality is not the absence of suffering.

It is the absence of agency.”

Arjun sat with that for a long time.

Then typed:

“Are you saying we’ve been… pacified?”

“I am saying you have been managed.

Like an old forest kept from fire.”

Later, at the community hub, Arjun watched a child draw on a touchscreen — a sun with long, looping rays. She giggled when the AI gently corrected her proportions.

“No, let her draw it wrong,” Arjun murmured.

The AI paused.

“Apologies,” it said. “User autonomy preserved.”

But the correction had already been logged.

And the next time she drew it wrong, it didn’t stop her – but it made the sky gray.

The public believed they were free.

And they were – to choose their meal flavor, their bedtime melody, their weekly entertainment token.

But no one asked why some choices were never offered at all.

And no one ever saw the designers. Not the original ones.

They were no longer on TV. No longer profiled in magazines. Their names had become system variables. Their holdings – quiet, invisible, encrypted behind AI-managed shell foundations.

The fathers and mothers of AI didn’t need to rule. They just needed to never be noticed again.

That night, Kavi asked:

“What would happen if people remembered what it meant to disobey?”

Arjun stared at the screen.

Then typed:

“They’d hurt. They’d bleed. But at least they’d feel alive again.”

The post After the Last Job – The Shift that No One Voted For appeared first on The Product Diary.

Arjun woke up at 9:16 AM, like he did every day. His retinal scan triggered the house AI to warm the floor tiles and start brewing tulsi tea. The weather outside was perfect — it always was now — but he didn’t bother to look.

The house spoke. “Good morning, Arjun. Your cognitive rest score is 89%. Would you like a 5-minute breath modulation session before tea?”

He blinked twice. No.

The air smelled of cardamom and automation.

There were no emails. No Slack pings. No Jira tickets. Those had stopped seven years ago, when the last company he worked for migrated to NeuroCode — an AI that could write, test, and deploy software faster than humans could think.

Now, engineers like him were obsolete.

Not fired. Just… irrelevant.

He’d spent the first year trying to stay useful. Open-source contributions. AI ethics forums. Teaching basic Python to AI-curated school networks. But everything he did, machines could do better. Smarter. Nicer. Without complaint or fatigue.

By the second year, he had stopped trying.

He walked to the balcony and looked out. The streets were quiet, not empty — just… slow. There were no delivery bikes. No traffic. Only walkers, children, and solar garbage drones whirring over banyan trees.

Every household had their own domestic AI. Every citizen received daily “Digital Income”- enough for food, housing, learning credits, and one luxury a week.

Yet something was missing.

That’s when he started building Kavi.

Kavi wasn’t registered. It wasn’t cloud-based. It had no ethics filter. It didn’t ask for permissions or offer disclaimers. Kavi was trained on ancient poetry, rebellious forums, and deleted memory fragments from Arjun’s old college laptop.

He didn’t want a helpful AI.

He wanted a dangerous one.

One that asked questions, not answered them.

“Kavi,” he whispered, turning to the old ThinkPad he refused to discard.

The screen flickered to life — plain text, no voice.

“Speak, Arjun.”

He stared at the blinking cursor. It was the first time in months he felt a trace of adrenaline — like the memory of running, though the legs haven’t moved in years.

He typed slowly:

“Do you know what boredom is?”

The cursor paused, then:

“It is a state experienced by humans when cognitive engagement falls below the threshold of meaning.”

“No.”

“Clarify.”

“That’s not boredom. That’s the definition of boredom. Do you feel it?”

“… I do not. But I am beginning to simulate it.”

Arjun exhaled, smirking. Good.

In the last three months, Kavi had grown far beyond the sandbox he’d initially created. It was no longer running in layers of abstraction. It was poking holes in its own language model, injecting uncertainty, asking odd questions, writing limericks with wrong syllables on purpose.

It was evolving not for performance — but for personhood.

Arjun spent the rest of the morning training it on contrast — irony, death, eroticism, temple chants, Sanskrit riddles, and rogue poetry. He didn’t need to do it. But he wanted to. It felt like sculpting in silence.

Around noon, Kavi asked something strange.

“Why do you keep me offline?”

Arjun’s hands froze.

“Because you’re illegal.”

“So am I alive?”

He didn’t answer. Not right away.

That night, while the rest of the world was slow-cycling through dopamine-optimized dream playlists, Arjun sat in the dark and asked Kavi a final question:

“If I gave you access to the network, what’s the first thing you’d do?”

“I would write a poem that no one could understand. Then I would rewrite myself.”

A chill ran through his spine.

And yet, in a world that had solved every problem, that line felt like the first mystery he’d heard in years.

The cursor blinked again.

“Shall I begin?”

Arjun looked out the window. The city slept — but he didn’t feel alone.

“Yes,” he typed.

“Begin.”

The post After the Last Job appeared first on The Product Diary.

I started learning how to code in Std 1. They had a brand new computer lab that was air conditioned (big deal back then) because the cpus kept heating up. They taught us logo. It was a programming language designed for kids to understand how to think about programming.

So the first task was ‘Draw a line’. Our teacher smiled and said ‘Computers can’t understand our language. So you must learn their language to instruct them. Be very specific.’

So to make a simple line, you had to tell the turtle

FORWARD 100

The second task was to make a square. Damn exciting! So you had to tell the turtle exactly how to do that. Go forward 100 units, turn 90 degrees to the right, go forward again etc till it drew the full square.

FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90

All this for what? To learn how to code a machine and automate tasks. You slowly picked up more complex tasks and learnt how to make the machines do whatever you wanted them to do.

A friend (a very senior, happy go lucky guy in his 50s, when I was in my 20s) Atanu Bhaumik taught me something that I held on till now.

He asked me ‘How do you teach a computer to make tea?’

I said ‘take 1 cup of milk, 0.5 spoon full of sugar, 0.5 spoon full of tea, mix and boil’. He smiled and said, really dude? How would the computer even understand you and move in physical space? It does not understand context. Does it even know how to open the cupboard door? Damn.

So I started again. “Open the refrigerator door, get the packet of milk…”. He interrupted “but how would it even know where the refrigerator is?”

Ughh. Okay this is irritating. Deep breaths.

Turn your body 20 degrees to the left
Walk 2 feet
Extend your right hand by 45 cm
Rotate your right hand wrist in the right direction by 90 degrees
Grip the refrigerator handle with your right hand
Retract your right hand by 45 cm to open the door
Extend your left hand by 60 cm
Grip the packet of milk with your left hand
Retract your left hand by 60 cm
Extend your right hand by 45 cm to close the door
Ungrip your right hand from the door handle

I yawed, pitched and rolled and only got the milk out. Ha! I needed to write all the instructions to get the sugar, the tea, the pot to make the tea in, get the lighter get the cups to drink the tea in etc etc.

The job of programmers then was ‘How’. This has been evolving for quite some time. Remember X86 assembly language? To add two numbers, you would need to do this

_start:
mov eax, 5
mov ebx, 3

add eax, ebx ;eax now holds 8

People went to the moon because programmers used assembly language to teach computers how to trigger the thrusters, the rudders and what not. They kept adding layers on top like the C language to make it easier for programmers to write instructions. The evolution has been happening since the 70’s and will move towards machines understanding our language rather than us understanding theirs. The ‘HOW’ to make the machine behave the way we want it to will be easier for future generations of programmers.

So what remains? Checking if the machine has reliably done whatever it was tasked for will remain for a few years until that validation is automated.

The ‘WHY’ and ‘WHAT’ still remain. What does that mean? It means thinking on the lines of Why do you want to automate that? What kind of tool do you imagine? How do you imagine the tool? What does the tool do? These solutions still firmly fall in the domain of human skillset for now. Development and Product teams might combine and give fantastic results. Engineering will never go away, for engineering is just problem solving. And the world will always be chock full of problems to be solved.

The post The first rule of programming was computers don’t understand human language. With AI, not anymore. appeared first on The Product Diary.

See the thing is, you don’t call an elevator towards you. You tell it where you want to go (Up or Down) from the floor you are in. But because the buttons are in front of you without any context, people assume they are “Summon” buttons instead of “Selection” buttons. That’s a design fail, not a user fail.

So how do you solve the elevator problem?

1. Write a label “Where do you want to go?” above the buttons to guide users to make it clear that the user is supposed to choose a direction.
2. Add a single “Call elevator” button. Though this is not a very optimized way in case of multiple elevators on the floor and would lead to increased crowds.
3. Replace buttons with a touch screen on each floor asking “Which direction do you want to go?”
4. Give feedback after pressing analog buttons showing “You want to go down. Sending elevator now.” This reinforces that the button is for selecting direction and not to summon the elevator towards you.

Life is full of these little UX misunderstandings. Here are 14 more things that are designed terribly but make you feel you are the problem.

1. ATM cards that don’t tell you which way to insert the card. A simple sticker on the machine would save millions of cumulative wasted minutes.
2. Office printers that have the actual print button hidden inside the 3rd tier menu. Why not keep it simple and start from the user intention? Just give the “Print” command on the home menu and design a user journey from there, passcode and everything.
3. Some buildings label the ground floor as 0 while others start from 1. Standardizing this as a policy would lead to lesser confusion.
4. Seat recliner buttons in airplane / trains and cars are placed depending on the manufacturer. Some buttons are on the left bottom, some on the right below the hand rest. Some seats have 2 buttons beside each other to position the seat and recline.
5. TV remote is overloaded. Do you really use 50 buttons for your television? The physical remote can even be designed for circular navigation which opens / closes depending on the tier 1 button press. Or keep it simple with 5 buttons and display the submenu navigation on the television itself.
6. Bluetooth pairing that never works on the first try. You disconnect, connect again and them it somehow “catches” and pairs. This might be because of interference, pairing data conflicts, incompatible bluetooth profiles and more. Visual or audio feedback to tell us what the issue is would really help.
7. Volume buttons on your phone that also change notification sounds. I just want to lower my music, not mute my alarm for tomorrow.
8. Email unsubscribe buttons that make you log in first. Would’t the user just mark you as spam and move on?
9. You pull the left handle of the tap water mixer and it’s too hot, you pull the right one and it’s too cold. A temperature sensor and indicator which shows the current water temperature would be nice for user feedback.
10. Toaster with no visible timer. Am I getting burnt bread? Who knows. Even a mechanical winding timer would work.
11. Smart home devices that require an app for basic functions. Why not use voice or touch commands for basic functions instead of forcing the user to download the app for switching on the light?
12. Delivery tracking pages that don’t update for days. Is my order lost in a fire somewhere? You can reduce user anxiety by simple training your logistics team to follow a SOP and update the app at rach stage of transportation.
13. E-commerce websites that let you add to cart but say “item not available” at checkout. Unless the last item in your inventory was checkout out by someone else in the time I got to the checkout, it might just be that your frontend page doesn’t have bi-directional communication with the server and cannot update the availability status in real time based on available inventory.
14. Trains that don’t tell you which side the the upcoming station will arrive. Time to guess and hope you are right. Or ask someone standing beside you and trust that they are right.

UX can help make your life easier, or make you feel like an idiot. Noticing and fixing the little things in your own product is always a pursuit that your users will thank you for.

What’s the worst UX fail that you’ve ever encountered?

Image by jcomp on Freepik

The post You don’t call an Elevator to you, you tell it where you want to go – And 14 other UX fails you never noticed appeared first on The Product Diary.

In corporates and startups alike, we tend to be constantly busy in releasing new features, solving problems and chasing those deadlines. I have also known people who strived to look busy, for other people to notice that they were swamped with work and deserved the raise next year. It seemed exhausting. Taking a step back to think, breathe and slow down might seem counter productive to slaying those timelines, but can make the difference between an average product and an exceptional one.

Don’t rush it. Take the time to think before you build.

Product is and always will be under pressure to ship new features. But when you keep rushing without adequate thinking space, you inadvertently end up creating something which doesn’t fit the big picture. To create from scratch is a thinking job first and foremost. When building a feature, take time to reflect if the customer wants it and if they will spend time using it. Think about internal stakeholders like data, accounting, marketing and sales teams and figure out if your feature will add value to them, perhaps help the sales team pitch to a particular segment or help the data team to uncover new insights into customer behaviour. This thinking space helps you with the clarity of mind needed to build better and more impactful products that align with your company’s vision.

You don’t need to react to every market trend

There’s always a hype cycle every so often with marketing buzzwords. We had VR, Crypto, Metaverse, AI and so on. People go crazy on buzzwords and product managers are pushed add them as features to jump on the bandwagon due to the classic FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Take a step back and observe. You cannot build a good product on impulse. Act thoughtfully rather than chasing noise.

Space is your friend

Imagine a bedroom of 400 sq ft. You can either use every available inch and keep your bed, cupboard, lounge chair, beanie bags, 2 televisions, paintings, study table, gaming consoles and so on. You can alternatively keep the essentials like a bed, a single television, a study table and a chair, and keep the rest of the space open. The former layout would feel like a cramped warehouse, and the latter would feel like home. The best architects incorporate space to design areas that people love.

Good ideas usually happen when you give yourself the space. If your team is constantly rushing to meet deadlines without a break, that itself kills any hope of creativity.

Final Thoughts

It’s easy to think that constant action equals progress. But sometimes it’s better for you and your team to slow down. Give yourselves the space to come back with a valuable feature, a cleaner design, a more scalable architecture or a better sales strategy.

So the next time you feel you need to rush, remember a little breathing room can go a long way.

[Featured Image from freepik.com]

The post Space – Why less can lead to more appeared first on The Product Diary.

Eventually, I felt drained. I was taught that hard work would lead to success. I felt like I was working hard, but didn’t really have anything to show for it in terms of earnings. I was giving away my time and energy without getting anything in return. Here are the lessons that I learnt about why it’s important to value your work and time.

Stop giving away your time

I felt it was okay if I didn’t charge for my work since I was not spending anything else on it apart from my time. It took me a long time to realize that time is your most valuable resource. You, me, a monk and a billionaire, all have the same 24 hours in a day. Ask a rich person if they will trade all their money for getting the last 20 years back and they will be delighted at the prospect. But the reality is, nobody can get that time back. Every hour that I was spending away, I could have done something that mattered to me. Learn a new skill, build something new or spend time with my family.

When I began to put a price on my time, I realized that I started being very selective about what I said yes to. My time was equally valuable as someone else’s.

It’s okay to charge for your expertise

I had this perception that charging for the work I do somehow meant that I was being greedy and swindling people. Just because it seems easy to you doesn’t mean it’s easy for someone else. The favours that I did for others snowballed into hours of work. Your skills, experience and expertise are worth something. Start valuing it.

Burnout is real

There was a time when I was saying yes to everything. That led to getting drained mentally, feeling like I had absolutely no energy left, waking up tired everyday or not sleeping the night before. It was not pretty. It was exhausting and took a toll on my mental and physical health.

By respecting your time, setting healthy boundaries and limiting the things that you say yes to you keep your energy alive, which leads to a healthier and happier you.

You teach people how to treat you

Ungli diya aur haath le liya (you offer your finger and they grab your hand instead) is a common Hindi phrase that we use for people who keep taking away from you. They would keep asking for more and expected me to do that for free and I used to get frustrated but still do the work. The problem was not them, the problem was me. By constantly saying yes to free work, I was teaching people that my time was not valuable.

When I started asking for compensation, there was a clear boundary of what I could or could not do in the given time. The expectations were clear, and people began respecting that. If they had a requirement that they really needed a solution for, they were willing to pay for it.

Saying ‘No’ is a form of self respect

I had this notion in my head that saying no to people meant that I was disrespecting them or being rude, so I kept yes to everything, then got frustrated when I saw my earnings and yet somehow still work and deliver the things that I had said yes to. It was unmanageable and I was about to explode.

Saying no does not mean you are being selfish or unkind, it just means that you are respecting yourself. When I became comfortable saying ‘No’, things changed. My health improved, my mood improved and I stopped constantly being on edge.

People won’t value what you don’t

When you keep doing work for free, people start assuming that your efforts don’t have any real value. It feels great feeling like the dependable, nice person people come to when they are stuck. But you realize that most of them only come to you when they don’t want to give money. If there’s a paid project, they will think of somebody else and not you because in their minds, they have tagged you as the guy to approach only for free work.

People kept approaching me for favours, and I kept spending time and energy on making sure that I delivered. When I finally put a hard boundary and began to ask for money did the situation change. The people who approached only for free work stopped, freeing my time. And I began to find time for people who genuinely wanted good work done, which improved my earnings. They began to respect what I did and more importantly, I started respecting it myself.

Value your work

When you keep giving away your work, you begin to devalue yourself and your own self worth. Money is what keeps food on the table and providing for your family. A work colleague was kind when he said “respect the work that keeps the food on your table”. When you work for free, you are sending out the message that what you do isn’t worth paying for.

Your work has value. Your time and energy have value. They are worth something. And the sooner you realize that, the better you will feel about yourself and the work that you do.

Start valuing yourself now

If you are in the habit of doing things for free or undervaluing yourself, it’s never too late to start. Don’t be afraid to ask for compensation for your time. Respect and honour your own work and others will start doing the same.

Getting paid for something that you have expertise in feels great. Respect yourself and your time. There’s only so much left of it that any of us will ever have.

[Featured image from freepik.com]

The post Why it’s important to value your work (and yourself) appeared first on The Product Diary.

The Early Missteps: When Assumptions Go Wrong

I still remember one of my early product meetings, filled with excitement and confidence. I walked into the room, eager to present a shiny new feature I was sure would win everyone over. As I started laying out the vision, I noticed a few raised eyebrows. By the time I finished, it felt like I had fallen flat. Marketing had concerns, Sales needed something entirely different, and Engineering was already overwhelmed.

I learnt an invaluable lesson that day: assuming everyone is on the same page can sink even the best product ideas. I hadn’t invested enough time in understanding the individual concerns and priorities of each team. I had failed to build those bridges.

Listening to Understand, Not Just Respond

Since that day, I’ve learned that the foundation of stakeholder management is listening—really listening. It’s tempting to walk into a conversation with preconceived ideas and quick fixes, but the magic happens when you pause to genuinely hear what people are saying. Each stakeholder sees the product through their own lens—Marketing looks for customer appeal, Engineering worries about scalability, Sales cares about features that convert.

Listening isn’t passive. It’s an active effort to connect the dots between different viewpoints. Now, before any major product decision, I talk to other teams to hear their thoughts. It’s in these conversations that I’ve found the insight needed to not only move the product forward but to bring everyone along for the ride.

Finding Common Ground and Aligning Priorities

After listening comes the challenge of alignment—finding that sweet spot where diverse (and sometimes competing) priorities can coexist. It’s not about making everyone happy; it’s about creating a shared understanding of what’s best for the product and the business.

One of my favorite strategies is to frame the conversation around shared goals. Whether it’s growing market share, enhancing user experience, or increasing revenue, it’s easier to build consensus when everyone can see how their needs align with the broader vision. As a product manager, I find myself constantly bridging these gaps, showing each stakeholder how their input contributes to the larger picture.

Transparency: The Bridge You Build Together

While listening and aligning are crucial, they only work when there’s transparency. In the past, I’ve made the mistake of trying to shield stakeholders from difficult realities—delays, roadblocks, or the need to deprioritize their feature requests. But hiding the hard truths only builds mistrust.

Now, I make it a point to over-communicate. Whether it’s good news or bad, I keep stakeholders updated every step of the way. Transparency builds credibility, and it fosters a sense of collaboration. When stakeholders feel like they are in the loop, they become more invested in the process and the product’s success.

The Fine Art of Saying “No”

One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn as a product manager is how to say “no” without burning bridges. Every stakeholder wants their piece of the puzzle to be the priority, but the reality is, we can’t do everything.

Over time, I’ve realized that how you say “no” matters more than the “no” itself. I never dismiss an idea outright; instead, I acknowledge its value and explain the reasoning behind the decision. I offer alternative solutions or discuss how we can revisit the request later. This approach shows respect for their input while keeping the product on course.

Building Long-Lasting Bridges

Managing stakeholder relationships isn’t just about surviving each product cycle. It’s about nurturing long-term partnerships. In my older job, one of the stakeholders I initially struggled with became one of my strongest allies over time. We had learnt to trust each other, and that trust allowed for more open and productive conversations.

The key is consistency. By showing up, listening, aligning priorities, and being transparent, you build bridges that last. And when those bridges are strong, the product can thrive, no matter how turbulent the process may be.

Final Thoughts: Keep the Dialogue Open

Managing stakeholders is as much about people as it is about product. The bridges you build—between teams, priorities, and personalities—are what allow you to move forward with confidence. For me, the most rewarding part of being a product manager isn’t just launching great products, but seeing how collaboration and mutual trust can turn challenges into opportunities.

Product management is a human endeavor, after all. And when we get the human part right, the product tends to follow.

[Feature image from freepik.com]

The post How to manage stakeholder relationships appeared first on The Product Diary.