Leadership

Last month I caught myself mid-sentence, explaining to my team why I was explaining something to my team. Second-order over-explaining. I stopped, genuinely confused about where that habit even came from. A face and a name came attached. Turns out most leadership advice works like that. Someone hands you a rule to live by, and if you dig a few layers down, it's usually scar tissue from the past. Three Weeks During one of my first internships, I was tasked with predicting whi

Hope the weekend was kind to you. Mine involved a tennis match I refused to lose even after it was obvious I already had. More on that in a minute. This newsletter isn't a productivity guide, and it's definitely not going to tell you to "never give up." If anything, it's the opposite. Today I want to talk about a difference we've all blurred at some point, at work, with people we love, and in our own heads at 11 PM when we really should've stopped two hours ago. Exhibit A, B,

Welcome to The Growth Lens. If you're reading this, you're one of the first people here, and I mean it when I say I'm glad you are. This is a fresh take, in a new style. Here's what I want this to be. Not another list of leadership frameworks you've already screenshotted and forgotten about​. I want to give you perspective, the kind you only get from watching the same human patterns play out again and again: in startups, ​with friends, in families, in group chats, in your own

I used to worship success. I used to think failure was something to minimize. Plan more + Predict better + Get it right the first time - this was my definition of competence. During my stint working closely with a CPO, I got a mandate that broke this belief completely. "Run as many A/B experiments as we can. The more we fail, the better our odds of success." I remember thinking, this makes no sense. Failure was supposed to be the thing you avoid, not chase. But we ran experim

Last week, I was watching a friend play tennis, and after losing a close set, he said: "I played the best tennis of my life today. I just lost." At first I thought he was consoling himself. But then I realised he wasn't wrong. He could control his footwork, his focus, his shot selection. He could not control the wind, the opponent's form, or that one lucky net cord. The scoreline said "loss." His performance said something else. Since then, I've been thinking about how rarely

Unpopular Opinion: Having a Plan B might be working against your Plan A. Behavioral science has long studied a concept sometimes called the "burning the boats" effect. When Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and burned his ships, his soldiers had one option left: fight and win. No retreat meant no mental bandwidth wasted on retreat. Researchers studying commitment devices have found something similar in modern decision-making: when an escape route exists, the brain quietly keeps

Your best customers are gathering evidence against you. They are doing it out of habit. They ask for something, get told no, and instead of arguing, they go test your organization somewhere else - a different rep, a different department, a different level of seniority. If they get a yes the second time, they now know something you don't: that your "no" was never really a company policy. It was just one person's answer. They won't tell you this. But they'll remember it. Here's

Your customers are lying to you. They don't even know they're doing it. They ask for a feature. What they mean is "make my pain go away." They ask for a discount. What they mean is "I don't feel like this is worth it." They ask for a policy change. What they mean is "something in this experience broke my trust." Most companies fulfill the request. The best companies decode the intent underneath it. The average businesses and great ones split by their ability to decode custome

Try this thought experiment with me for a minute. You're on a hiring panel. There's a candidate sitting across from you. Smart, sharp, clearly capable. But something's off. They don't laugh at the right moments. They challenge an assumption you didn't even know was an assumption. They don't feel like "one of us." So you pass. You tell yourself it's instinct. You call it culture fit. Now imagine the opposite scenario. Every single hire from here on out feels effortless. They g

In 2009, Domino's was the fastest pizza company in the world and customers hated the pizza. In their own taste tests, people rated identical pizza lower the moment they were told it came from Domino's. The brand itself had become a flavor and it tasted like punishment. Most companies bury feedback like that. You rework the recipe, keep the cameras off, and hope nobody remembers how bad it got. Admitting the product is broken feels like handing customers a reason to leave. Dom

Chasing fairness in an unfair world is stupidity. Life doesn't distribute talent, opportunity, or circumstance equally. It never has, and never will. Yet we've built entire systems - political, social, institutional, around the pursuit of fairness. Why? Because the human mind cannot tolerate randomness. Psychologists call this the "just-world hypothesis", our deep cognitive need to believe that outcomes are deserved. That if we work hard enough, follow the right rules, and fi

We've been solving the wrong problem in customer experience for decades. Customers said they hated waiting. So we took their word for it. We threw technology at the wait time. Self-help. Automated responses. Chatbots. Then AI arrived and gave us exactly what we thought customers wanted instant everything, and customers still asked for a human. Were customers being dishonest? Well, not really. What customers actually hated waiting for was not resolution, but reassurance. The a

The last time someone on your team brought you bad news, what did you do in the next ten seconds? That reaction matters more than the open-door policy you've put in place. It's the moment your team learns what honesty actually costs in your organisation. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson uncovered this almost by accident while studying medical teams in the 1990s. She expected the best-performing teams to report fewer errors. Instead, she found the opposite: the higher-performi

13 MILLION SELLERS in 2021. ₹0 STARTING CAPITAL. How Two IIT Graduates Built a Business Model So Hard to Copy, Shopsy by Flipkart Failed Trying. In 2015, Amazon and Flipkart were at war for urban India. But these two IIT graduates, Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal went the other direction. They went to the housewife in Nagpur reselling sarees on WhatsApp. The boutique owner in Surat with no supply chain access. The first-generation entrepreneur in Patna who wanted to start a

The wrong people will convince you that wanting more is something to be ashamed of. Here’s why I say this: In college, after scoring among the highest in my semester, a group I used to call friends walked into my hostel room and spent an hour calling me a nerd and laughing at me. I don't call them friends anymore. In fact, I haven’t seen or spoken to them since I graduated college. I've had the pleasure of genuinely great company and the displeasure of really poor ones. The d

I've worked across Fintech, Healthcare, HR Tech and SaaS. A poorly handled customer query costs you differently in every single one. They all underestimate the emotional weight of the problem they're solving. The fundamentals of great CX never change, regardless of where you are: - Clear communication - Predictable response times - Fair resolutions - Keeping your word - Consistency - across product, operations, communications, and support Simple in theory. Brutally hard in pr

Every hiring manager has said it. "Skills can be trained. Hire for attitude." I've hired for attitude. It works - until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's not a small problem. Here's something experience taught me that no hiring framework will: Attitude gets you in the door. But attitude without the foundational skill to back it - creates a very specific kind of mess. The person works hard. Wants it badly. But can't execute. And because they care so much, feedback becomes

Team A doubles their customer base in 12 months. They celebrate. Hires more sales reps. Team B doubles their customer base in 12 months. Then asks - can our experience handle this? One of these teams will be fighting churn in Q3. You already know which one. Here's what ends up getting skipped in all the celebrations: Growth exposes you. Every crack in your process, every gap in your handoff, every promise your sales team made that your ops team can't keep - scale just makes i

What if you could just... ask? Just open WhatsApp and type - "I left my charger at the office, can you get it?" and someone would do that for you? In CX, we talk endlessly about reducing friction. Dunzo, in 2014, had eliminated it entirely. I've spent years studying what makes customers come back, what makes an experience stick and what Dunzo had built, almost accidentally, was the answer. They just didn't have a name for it yet! It should have been called a conversational co

Founders hire their first CX leader in one of two moments. Either the reviews are bad, the churn is visible, and the founder is getting tagged in angry tweets - meaning the damage is already done and whoever walks in is inheriting a fire. Or the product is still finding its feet, the customer base is too small to generate real signal, and the hire ends up building processes for problems that do not exist yet. Both are expensive mistakes. One costs you money. The other costs