I’m a product manager that sees businesses as fascinating rubric cubes to solve.

To create a great business you must work through a mind boggling amount of permutations of vision, strategy and execution to get it right. I love diving into the weeds of those permutations and finding the right one to go to market with. But I always find myself abstracting away from the doing and thinking through the process...

Philosophies / Mantras that shape my thinking

🤔 How I Think

• Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held

• Balancing Systems Thinking & First Principles

• What got us here won’t get us there.

• There's things that have the right to be complicated

• See both sides of the argument, and make your best effort to choose a side.

• Businesses are the hardest game to win

🛠️ Ways of Working

• Always be experimenting

• Outcome is more important that sticking to a process

• Focus on answering the right question, even if that means spending less time on answering - Principals over Frameworks

• Delivering the wrong feature faster still delivers no value.

• Better than best in class is necessary for core differentiation

🤼 Culture

• If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

• There is a false dichotomy between the culture of learning and a culture of results

• Access to knowledge isn’t nearly as difficult as the desire to learn

• Take two managers. Manager A is 100% confident about their decision — just because. Manager B is 70% confident and explains why they’re at 70% and what they’re unsure about. Who do you believe

How I view success:

Outcome - Properly defined, and makes sense for the vision of the company

Bonding - Seeing how people work, and working through the trenches together to achieve a common goal

Learnings - Can be done through success and failure. Ability to reflect does not necessarily result in learnings.

How I communicate:

I like to communicate in writing - as it's concrete and doesn't provide leeway for fast words to replace coherent thoughts.

I like to abstract into visual doodles - that might make sense to me (because of internal monologues) but not make sense to people who see it without explanation.

Direct - For 90% of my interactions, I like to stay objective and provide feedback and thoughts which are rationale in nature.

Things I do that may annoy you or be misunderstood:

Pushing the envelope into dangerous rabbit holes - I sometimes feel the need to understand nuances even if they don't seem relevant. It's usually because I'm trying to connect my own internal thoughts and may seem tedious and off-topic.

I like to jump in my conversations - It's not necessarily because I've lost interest in the previous conversation, but rather I have come to a conclusion that has led me to the next topic. I often forget people can't read my thoughts and may lose people when I do this. Please stop me if something stops making sense.

I like to skip small talk - It's not that I don't want to know you, it's just that when I'm focused on something in particular, other things can seem like less of a priority. My sense of camaraderie is not correlated with small talk, but rather my ability to trust your intuition and banter through work.

I need the bigger picture - Because I like to solve undefined problems, if I'm given discrete tasks without the bigger picture, I have a tendency to assume the broader picture and solve for the discrete tasks with those assumptions in mind - leading to misalignment and potential re-work.

I work much better in the 80/20 space. - Working through unknowns give me energy, filling in the blanks takes away energy.

I don't have a sense of work/life balance - if my brain is on, I might message you during off-work hours. (I need to better respect other people's work/life balance).

What gains and loses my trust:

Gaining my trust

• Working in the trenches together.

• Presenting your ideas & your thinking without filters

Losing my trust

• A clear misalignment between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge

• Afraid of asking dumb questions

• Clear violation of transparency (taking advantage of opaqueness)

My strengths:

• Ideating on how things can be better

• Providing refinement in thinking

• Asking questions that generate further discussion

• Abstracting away from the detail and understanding the broader processes, mindsets and constraints that can suppress potential step-change.

My Weaknesses:

• Interest wains over time and follow through capability -

  Once I get uninterested, my brain goes onto autopilot mode and wonders towards unsolved, more interesting problems.

• Providing my rationale as definitive, even when they're not -

• I have strong beliefs on non-verified assumptions. It’s necessary to build towards a bigger picture. This does not mean I don’t want to hear evidence to the contrary.

[🔒 Deep dive on Opera GX]

Similarly to OperaGX, Opera.Rocket will leverage the foundation of the core Opera experience and enhance it with functionality specific to creators.

Let’s dive into why this makes sense and what this could look like.

Why now:

The Creator Economy - Tapping into the wave of upcoming creators that will utilise progressive software & hardware to help them create unique assets, goods and experiences that their community will enjoy. Knowledge Management - My view right now is that our ability to create, manage and store knowledge is at the cusp of disruption. In terms of impact, I think it will be on the same magnitude as the internet. (This is something I’m looking to explore further in my writing.)

Recap on creator economy:

The creator economy refers to the fact that increasingly people who are able to create and provide a unique good or service can earn a form of income comparable and sometimes even more than a normal corporate job. The creator can create anything ranging from music, arts and craft, knowledge, merchandise - anything of distinct value that someone else is willing to pay for.

[Read more 🔒 Creator Economy]

Explosion of NFTs, Web3

The experience at the intersection of apps is a real battleground. Creating seamless experiences that transcend your own software will increasingly become a differentiator for software & apps, especially if their main purpose is primarily functional and there are more value-adding services downstream.

Recap on Unbundling vs bundling

It’s easy to see the dominance of a few companies in their respective domains as software goes through the wave of convergence.

With the likes of:

• GCP, Azure & AWS owning the cloud space

• JIRA, Trello, Asana, Airtable & Monday owning the Project Management space

But at the same time, a lot of these companies have the smart thing of creating a marketplace for plugins. What that allows them to do is essentially outsource a lot of the heavy lifting for key uses cases outside of their target demographic. Software has indeed eaten / taken over the world, and as people become increasingly more comfortable with software and their respective functionalities, they start demanding more.

As humans, we crave progression, it’s what has allowed to build skyscrapers, reach the moon, travel through continents - we have the distinct ability to envision something - and realise it. The other side of that coin is that our default baseline of expectations continually increases, as our experiences with frontier leading companies bleeds into our expectations for other applications and software.

Target Audience:

Creators that want to be Productive with their iPad (and potentially find themselves with a laptop replacement)

Macro Jobs - A primer of JTBD

💡 *"Improve your life-situation; become more than you are"*

Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.

Understanding the Marco Job for Creators

[🔒Breaking down macro jobs using JobCards]

[🔒Understanding the abstraction of job to solve]

Features worth building

Moat & Monetisation Feature:

Instead of the GX Corner, design a Productivity Studio, a suite of carefully curated apps that you believe can truly help them become a better creator.

This builds on the idea opinionated software

Make Opinionated Software

Help your customers become more productive by creating opinionated software stacks. Best set of workflows (and apps) for -

• Storing knowledge Drawing Creating mood boards

Make this a highly searchable and customisable experience

And it all starts with Opera.Rocket

Painpoint Feature:

No keyboard shortcuts - How can I quickly navigate through to where I want to be.

Additional Features to consider:

It’s an iPad, so there needs to be a consideration for keyboard shortcuts & pen input.

Moat & API Focus Feature

Create opera relevant integrations for creators. Understand how inspiration feeds into the creators’ creation process and create APIs that allow seamless sharing, storing and utilisation of inspiration.

That’s it!

As someone who has long been a fan of video games & an economics enthusiast, the intersection of game monetisation has been fascinating for me. This was an array of revenue opportunities I saw for Valorant moving forward incepted around June 2021.

Creating skins for different characters (similar to dota and league of legends)

Description: Creating different tiers of character skins, ones that are simply cosmetic changes, to ones that have different skillshot animations / effects.

• Just Cosmetic Change -

• Skillset Based - Examples being Sova's ulti being a different color and different animation.

• Customizable cosmetics - Similar to the chromas offered in League of Legends, customizable cosmetics is a branch of cosmetic changes which have additional settings / configurations that can be changed between games.

Target Audience: Players who like main-ing one character and have an affinity towards their skillset. They play this game competitively (definition of this is solo queing for several hours a week).

Pros:

• An extension of customization in the game. Allows people to show their personality / who they are even more.

• A new revenue stream to leverage from existing user base

Cons:

• Can make the game confusing for new players (who is this)

• If not implemented properly, could make the game feel overwhelming (too many animations detract from core gameplay)

• Not all heroes can have skillsets that can change without severely impacting core gameplay.

Potential Price - Same pricing as gun skins 875 - 3500VP (~7.5 - 32 USD)

Subscription for a set of skins

Description - This is giving players access to a set of skins on a monthly basis that they can use but they don't own. Different tiers can be created based on what effects they have and how expensive the original skins are.

Target Audience - Price conscious customers who still want to access to cool skins. More likely to get bored and likes change.

Pros

• Completely different revenue stream and audience to monetize from

• It's a try before you buy program - can get people to convert to buying the real thing if they really enjoy that skin

Cons

• Can be seen as a product that cannibalises existing and more lucrative revenue streams

Potential Price - 1500VP (~15USD)

Pay to play better systems

Description -

Similar to DotaPlus, LeapFrog or some of the pre-mature analytics services out there for Valorant, these systems will augment the stats and datapoints that Valorant records to give players a better understanding of how to get better. I can make a more detailed post about this if there's interest. But because of the lack of public APIs, there is a unique value proposition for a service that Valorant provides vs one that is third party.

Target Audience -

Players who like getting better. This is less about what skill level they are (although there will be a correlation with people who will want these services and people who are in plat / diamond is my hypothesis) I think this again can be based on their tendency to solo que.

Pros

• Again, a completely different revenue stream that Valorant can capitalise on.

• This can be a great retention feature, as it gives intent on people who want to get better

• Creates a way for UGC to be showcased and create an avenue to outsource acquisition & retention efforts.

Cons

• Can be seen as a pay to win feature for Valorant.

Potential Price - 500 VP (~$5 USD)

Professional Analytics & Analysis Capability

Description -

As Valorant becomes more competitive, professional teams will look for an edge using analytics (prime examples being basketball, & baseball). In the same vein, there is a lot of untapped data that professionals can take advantage of to improve gameplay. Examples including:

• Where do professionals lose duels (one on one fights) & what variables are highly correlated (verticality, distance, gun usage, what stage of the round)

• How do the handle certain situations (retaking a site vs attacking a site), and how do they compare vs other professional teams

• What rounds are they expected to win (and lose) and vice versa

As professional teams start hiring data-centric analysts, it is safe to assume a new set of capabilities are necessary to empower their day to day activities.

Target Audience -

Professional organizations who are competing in tier 1 competitions.

Potential Price - $4000 a month (1 person's monthly salary)

Creating new game types

Description -

This looks to the meteoritic rise of AutoChess as inspiration, and looks to transforms Valorant from a game into an universe. If you look at one of the overwhelming trends of online games, it can be seen as the new local playground, where people and friends just wanna hang out. This revenue strategy looks to capitalize on this, and create avenues for people to hang out and have casual fun that doesn't just focus on 5 on 5 gameplay.

Examples

• Capture the Flag

• BunnyHopping Challenges (but for certain heroes)

• FallGuys like obstacle challenges

Target Audience -

Casual gamers who want to find a game to chill out and play with friends.

Pros

• Completely different base to acquire potential players from. Ability to convert them into playing the core game can also be very high dependent on the new game types

Cons

• Obviously very different in terms of roadmap, and will need a huge initial investment of resources to get up and running.

Potential Price - Free or Paid depending on game type.