Already Broke Your New Year Resolution? Try This Scrum Inspired Method Instead

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Most people don’t make it past the first month of the year before breaking their new year resolutions. And the primary reason is that most of us fail to put a plan in place. And even if there’s a plan, the hustle of routine life takes over and the resolutions are forgotten.

Also, it’s a human tendency to think that we can make drastic changes to our life overnight. While it’s good to have big hairy audacious goals, but it’s important to be remember that big goals require consistent efforts.

“Most people overstimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years” – Bill Gates (probably)

While working with agile scrum teams for the past 7 years, I realized that the key reason for their widespread success is that they plan, act, and reflect on small goals consistently. These small goals add up to deliver some amazingly complex projects with time.

So I took my learnings from working with scrum teams to come up with a method that helps you take a path of continuous achievement and improvement.

Step 0: Create a  bucket list (Your life’s backlog/roadmap)

If you don’t have a bucket list, then take out time and start creating one now. Think of your core values, ambitions, and dreams, or simply jot down goals across categories like travel, self-improvement, achievements, family, etc.

A dipstick check before you add an item to your bucket list should be that it should give you joy while you are working on it and it should give you a sense of fulfillment/achievement once completed.

P.S. There are many good online tools that you can use to manage your bucket list. Here’s the one that I use

P.P.S. If you are still struggling with bucket list ideas, try the Flip-It! exercise.

Step 1: Identify a Focus Item

In this step, go through your bucket list and pick one item that you are going to focus on in the immediate future. Ensure that it is something on which you can make some form of progress within a week’s time.

While some items can be finished within a short duration of time with focussed efforts, there are going to be items that are going to take a lifetime to complete. If you decide to focus on such an item, identify a smaller goal that takes you closer to the end goal and treat it as your focus item.

For example, a bucket list item for me is to write a book. But with my current full-time job and other commitments, I don’t have the time and energy to start writing a book and take it to completion. So I decided that a good goal for the near future would be to create a habit of writing. So I made “write at least 1000 words daily for the next 28 days” as my focus item. Once I achieve it, I’ll revisit my bucket list to figure out my next focus item (or continue with the current one).

Step 2: The Weekly Retro Hour

Once you have your first focus item, go ahead and put a weekly recurring 1-hour block on your calendar. This is the hour where you are going to reflect on your week and plan for the next week. This is the best thing that you can do to keep you focused on your goals in the routine hustle of life.

First 30 minutes: Keep your bucket list, the focus item & the list of previous week’s actionables in front of you. Now, reflect on your past week and write down things/activities/behaviors that you need: To Continue,  More of, Less of, Start, Stop.

Next 30 minutes: Look at the things that you have written down and find out the actionables for the next week

Step 3: Work!

No amount of planning can help you achieve a goal unless you work on it. So use the list of actionables from the retro hour at the start of each day of the week and make consistent effort to complete them one by one.

Instead of planning day by day, I prefer to pick up items from the list depending on my energy and mental inclination throughout the week/day.

Don’t worry if you are not able to complete all the actionables of the week. As long as you are consistent with your retro hours, things will eventually fall in place!

Step 4: Celebrate!

Whenever you complete a focus item or a bucket list item, ensure that you celebrate it.

Share it with friends/family, share it on social media, put up a picture on your wall, go out for drinks, or anything else that works for you. Don’t spend your entire life waiting to achieve that big goal.

But ensure that at the end of the celebration, you’ve identified the next focus item!

JustGo: Your personal fun planner

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I love everything related to planning – whiteboards, to do lists, excel sheets and so on. I plan my weekdays for maximum productivity on work and personal aspects. But somehow, I really suck at planning for my spare time on weekends. Usually, making plans with friends or family is limited to fixing a time and a place to meet. But when we actually meet, we end up either going out to the usual places for drinks, food or a movie. And every time I ponder why aren’t we able to explore so many interesting places and things to do in my city?

On introspection and discussing with my friends and colleagues, I discovered the main reason was decision fatigue. Most of my friends including myself suffer from so much decision fatigue during our daily work and personal life that we are too exhausted to plan for fun. No doubt, we want to have fun, but planning for it becomes a chore.

Next, I tried to search for an app or a website that would help me solve this problem – A service that’ll curate a mini-itinerary based on my interests for spending my spare time during weekends or evenings. I explored multiple event discovery apps but with them I still had to take many decisions and do some form of research before finalizing what to do. What are the available options? When is the event happening? How far is it? How does the traffic look like?

Why can’t be there a service which does all this work for me? And if such a service would exist, what would it look like? Let’s have a look.

What would be required to create JustGo and how would it look like?

As you might have started guessing by now, success of such an app would depend on getting access to rich data on multiple aspects – users, potential activities, weather, traffic, etc. The quality of user profiling, availability of relevant data points about activities and accurate data on external factors like traffic, whether conditions, etc would be essential to come up with good enough recommendations to motivate users to outsource the decision making process to an app.

To understand how all the data would come together and help the user in having the best experience every time he goes out for fun, let’s split the entire design into four key modules – The user profiler, the activity curator, the concierge and the executor.

 

Just Go modules for personal time planner

P.S. If you wish to skip any design details and are interested to see how JustGo would look like to the end user, I would recommend skipping directly to the third module, The Concierge. (Click Here to skip to The Concierge)

Module 1: The User Profiler

This module would be responsible for collecting and collating the data on the user and then map the user into different categories. But to understand a human using data to the extent of being able to mimic decisions on his behalf is not a straight forward task. Some of the data points that every data scientist working on the algorithms of JustGo would love could include:

JustGo: User Data Attributes

While some of the data would be readily available with social media and search engines (..but why would Google or Facebook share this data with JustGo? Well, I’ll answer this question at the end of the article), there are many attributes that will need to be specifically asked from the user. But getting the user to fill so much data is a daunting task for an app. Any friction leads to a high drop-out. So maybe instead of being a full-on survey – the data gathering would need to be split into fun questions or games across a period of app usage.

One key point to note is that these data attributes mostly capture persistent attributes of a person i.e. they might not change for years for most people. The non-persistent personal attributes (mood, energy level, etc) would be handled by the third module, The Concierge.

To avoid getting too much technical, let’s say the module would then use the data and prepare micro personas (mostly numerical values and not any human understandable labels) with the help of machine learning algorithms which will then be consumed by the The Concierge module later on.

Module 2: The Activity Curator

Once we ‘know’ our user, we need to know the set of activities and experience that can be presented to him. The Activity Curator would work to create a database of activities – places, events and experiences that can be matched with the user’s taste and requirements. This list of would need to capture all the data attributes that humans either explicitly or implicitly use while deciding to participate in an activity. The following figure lists some of these attributes.

JustGo: Activity Data Attributes

Again, collating such detailed and accurate information for a large set of activities is a challenge. While we can design crawlers and invite users to act as contributors, it’ll take a lot of time and investment for a startup to come up with a usable build. But if talk about Google, it is one of the companies which have already managed to source quality data on businesses across all verticals. For them, it should be a straight forward task of identifying the missing pieces of data and then introducing simple touch points across their services to capture them.

Module 3: The Concierge

This module is going to be the face or the front-end of the service for the user. Whenever the user needs to look for recommendations on itineraries to go out, he just opens the app and punch in a few preferences – how much time does he have, how much money is he willing to spend and what kind of group is he planning the evening with. To stay true to its core value proposition, JustGo should only capture information which is more like facts at this point of time and shouldn’t force the user to make any kind of decision.

A rough wire-frame for the user could look something like the figure below:

JustGo: User Screen Wireframe

 

Once the user submits the information, machine learning algorithms will go to work to match the user profile and preferences with the available activity options, using the above inputs more as filters to come up with curated itineraries. After figuring out thousands of itineraries that fit in the above criteria, the user would be shown tinder like cards starting with itineraries that has the maximum expected experience score (the parameter that the machine learning algorithms would strive to most accurately predict). The algorithms to calculate the experience score would need to be designed to mimic human decision-making using aspects like:

  • Relevance to the user: Everyone might not enjoy an art exhibition and similarly everyone might not visiting loud pubs
  • Quality of the activity: Not everyone would like to visit a pub with a deteriorating ambiance even if it offers really cheap drinks
  • Experience of getting to the activity: There would users who would love to go on a long drive to a specialty diner but not when there are traffic jams on the way
  • Contextual decisions: Preferring indoor activities in case of rains or if it’s too hot, avoiding highly crowded places and so on.

Once the algorithms have completed their calculations, the user would be presented with tinder like cards, each containing one of the curated itinerary, in decreasing order of the expected experience score. Let’s have a look at the wire-frames of some of these cards, each representing the difference in outcomes basis the different parameters selected by the user at the first screen:

Just Go Wireframes Just Go Wireframes Just Go Wireframes

Module 4: The Executor

If the user accepts one of the recommended itineraries, the service would need to integrate with a host of third party services to offer a seamless experience to the user. Some of them would include:

  • Booking an Uber ride/ starting navigation through Google Maps
  • Make reservations for movies, theaters and book tables at restaurants, etc
  • Enabling payments

At the background, the module would also need to work on gathering information to measure how closely did the user stick to the recommended itinerary and guess or ask the experience feedback to help in improving results in the future.

How would JustGo make money?

Although, launching a service like this would involve a lot of investment in collecting the data and getting the users to trust the accuracy of the suggested recommendations, but once the critical mass of user base is reached, the revenue avenues are tremendous through streams like:

  • Commissions on any bookings done through the app
  • Collation of user data (which is the oil of the future)
  • Business services to help newer experiences and businesses get included in the suggested itineraries

But why am I not making this?

First of all let me answer the question: why would companies like Google or Facebook share data with a service like this? Well, they probably won’t or may not be legally allowed to do so. And maybe that is the biggest reason I have not quit my day job and started work on the idea.

While a startup can device mechanisms to collate some of the data, a new organization is no match with the absolute wealth of data available with Google across users and businesses alike. In fact, I am sure that we can see such highly specialized contextual recommendation use cases maybe built within the Google Assistant. So this is a big shout out to the product people @Google: Please make this a reality soon! (I would love to help).

Buying a car in an AI driven world

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Meet John, a creative designer for a leading fashion brand. His home is driven by IoT, with all major functional aspects monitored and managed through a personal assistant, Eli residing on his smartphone and smartwatch. With accurate data on John’s movements and habits, Eli’s AI algorithms are working behind the scene to automate an ever increasing list of daily decisions and activities performed by John.

For instance, based on John’s movements tracked through sensors in his smart watch, Eli knows John’s normal morning routine. Eli knows that the first thing John does after waking up is to brush his teeth, followed by exercise, shower and finally food preparation. Eli can accurately predict when John will step out of his home for work and times the booking of an Uber so that it is waiting for him when he reaches the roadside curb.

Now John decides that he needs to buy a car to use on weekends and asks Eli what options he has. After John tells Eli to refine the options based on his preferences, Eli books the test drive for the selected models as per his availability. Once, he takes a car for a test drive, Eli can sense that he likes a particular model based on changes in his body vitals like blood pressure, heart beat, etc. Eli then calculates how much loan would John require and starts negotiation with multiple financial institutions represented by their smart-bots respectively and arrives at the best offers suited to John within milliseconds. As soon as John completes the test drive, the option to buy the car is presented on the screen of his smartwatch, followed by a prompt to choose among the financing offers shortlisted by Eli. Few-taps on his smartwatch and the new car is delivered to John’s doorstep.

In the background, ABC bank’s bot, Sam received a request for an auto loan from Eli with all the relevant details of John. Sam calculates the risk profile of John and provides a competitive offer to Eli and once John accepts the offer, a smart contract is created between John, ABC bank, the car dealer and the bank managing the salary account of John. Since, the ownership of the car is governed by the smart contract, physical hypothecation is not relevant anymore. A portion of John’s salary is automatically blocked for repayments towards the car loan as soon as it is credited to the salary account. To handle situations resulting in financial hardship, the smart contract already provides for a suitable mechanism to provide options for John to seek a repayment holiday and arrange funds. Any irresponsible behavior or deliberate actions to avoid the repayments would automatically lead to transfer of ownership of the car to ABC bank and penalty details & default alert broadcasted to all accounts linked with John to recover the loss incurred by ABC bank.

5 Features I Wish My Smartphone Had!

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Technology has evolved at a mind numbing pace. Evolution of smartphones is the biggest proof that most of have experienced at a personal level. Now, when you think about the future of smartphones in 2019, you’ll think about foldable screens, 5G, augmented reality, etc. But I believe that some features should already have been there in our smartphones now, but because of certain factors they didn’t get on the priority of designers. It could be because of the challenging form constraints or just because they didn’t deliver the right ROI. Feasible or not, I would love if my smartphone had the following 5 features.

1. Extendable Screens

Imagine placing two or more phones with NFC together and immediately the content of the primary phone spreads across the available screens and the phones start working together like a giant phone screen.

 

2. Switchable Screen Privacy

Nobody likes prying eyes on their phone screen while on a subway, in office or even at home. To avoid this, there are multiple screen privacy films available in the market. These screens use polarization to restrict any angular light waves so that the screen is visible only to someone who is viewing it directly. But these filters considerably darkens the screen brightness.

I would love to see some sort of display hardware which offers electricity driven polarization. This would mean you can simply turn screen privacy feature on and off from phone settings. You can just turn the polarization on when you need privacy and work with the resultant darkened screen. When done, simply turn it off and go back to using your brilliantly lit screen.

3. Self Charging Phone

The struggle to improve battery performance to power the continuously more powerful devices is not new. Researchers are working to improve the battery capacity and performance for quite some time now.

I believe everyone would love phones which come with transparent solar panels integrated within screens, gyroscopes within the phone producing electricity from physical movement or any other form of real time energy capturing mechanisms that either extends the battery life or even completely remove the need to recharge a battery.

And looking at the recent developments in the industry in the form of independent phone cases or specialized screens, we can expect a true self charging phone in the coming future.

4. Self Balancing Phones

Everyone would relate to the struggle to find a book or pillow or just anything to keep your phone stay up while binging on a Netflix series or watching a movie on your phone while lying in your bed. Or maybe trying to watch a youtube video while having a quick meal. It’s really inconvenient to hold the phone for long periods of time. It’s true that you can opt for a mobile case with a built-in stand, but it’s definitely not an elegant solution.

I think it should be theoretically possible to incorporate the technology used in Segway scooters that help them keep an upright position within phones. Imagine just putting your phone on any surface at any angle of your choice and it stays that way. I know this one’s a real stretch, but just try to imagine the convenience and coolness of the feature.

5. Offline Lost Phone Tracking

Ever lost a phone? Or unfortunate enough for your phone to be stolen away from you? The first thing that the thief would do is to switch it off. The only way to track the phone would be to hope that the thief would switch it on and the phone would establish a connection.

But, sadly the thieves are usually not that naïve these days. They have found multiple ways to dispose-off phones with reported and blocked IMEI. It would be really helpful if there can be a way to trace and locate smartphones that have been switched off. Update: Apple has introduced some offline mode tracking. Hopefully, we’ll see it soon in android phones as well

Closing Notes

Please feel free to comment if you any other capabilities you’d like to see in your phone. Also, do share which of the above functionalities would you love to have in your phone.

GravityCharger: An Off-grid Mobile Charger

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While on a vacation, I was driving through a village in central India and stopped for a break at the local market. The most interesting thing that caught my eye was a cart with big batteries and close to a dozen mobile phones placed on it. It was strange to see this assortment in the middle of a local market, and I went to talk to the cart owner to know exactly what he was selling. Guess what the service was? He was not selling any product, he was selling electricity. Any customer can come and charge their phone and pay for every 15 minutes slot the phone gets charged.

Later I got to know these kind of setups can be found not only in Indian villages but in many other pockets of Asia and Africa. And the key reason that they exist is that there still many areas where people have access to smartphones and mobile signals but not to reliable electricity supply.

Internet access is one of the biggest factor that has positively impacted the lives of people across the globe. However, the people who can benefit the most from internet access, are having trouble to do so despite having the right tools just because of not being able to charge their phones.

I decided to come up with a product concept to solve the problem: “How to generate sufficient electricity to charge a phone, without relying on the grid, in a cheap and reliable manner?”

Evaluating existing options

The ideal product/solution should be:

  1. Inexpensive, as the target users are expected to have limited spending power
  2. Low to zero maintenance, as the users might be located in remote locations with limited access to service centers/spare parts
  3. Able to produce electricity reliably, with no dependence on external factors
  4. User friendly to ensure mass user adoption

A quick Google search revealed that there are a lot of alternatives available to provide off-grid lighting and power storage, but most of them fail to deliver on at least one of the factors mentioned above.

Gravity to the rescue

The challenges with the existing alternatives were not because of the product design, but because of the intrinsic properties of the the source of energy they were using. So, instead of designing a better product that relied on these sources of energy, I needed to find an alternative clean source of energy that is more reliable and freely available.

I realized that gravity scored well on all the evaluation factors. It is free, available everywhere and among the most consistent of all nature’s forces. If a product can be designed to somehow harness gravity in a convenient manner, we might have a solution to the problem.

Product Concept

The device could either utilize pulleys or gears to convert the downward force on weights raised to a height to turn a dynamo which in turn would produce electricity. As a user, I would just gather around some rocks or put sand in bags and place them on a pan or hang them from a hook and just start charging my phone. A rough concept diagram would look like this:

But there are certain design challenges that I have not covered. The feasibility of a production grade product would depend upon whether sufficient power to charge a phone (approx 5 W) can be produced with a manageable weight and a convenient reset cycle (lifting the weight again to restart the power supply). Also, once the balance has been achieved, the design would require multiple iterations so that the end product looks like a gadget in a household rather than an experiment in the middle of somebody’s home.

Closing Notes

Please comment if you would like to share your thoughts on the feasibility of such a device. Also, I would love to hear your ideas on what are some other ways in which gravity can be used for household applications.

 

Flip-It! An elegant idea generation exercise

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If you are reading this, there are high chances that you either work or aspire to work in a field that requires constant innovation and love working with new ideas. I am in the same boat as you. Both of us would relate to that euphoric moment when an idea just pops into our head and saves the day. Be it working on products, coming up with blog ideas, solving a real life problem – creative ideas just make the life easier.

But more often than not, there are times when new ideas are just hard to come by, especially when there’s a deadline associated with it. The same thoughts keep on presenting themselves dressed in different ways and we need some inspiration to break the cycle.

Through this blog, I wanted to share a simple, elegant yet powerful way to induce lateral thinking and break the creative block – Flip-It!

How it Works

Think of an obvious concept or fact related to the area you are trying to find inspiration in and write it down. Now try to think what something opposite of that would look like. That’s it!

If I break the process into three simple steps, they would be:

Step 1: Ask an obvious question related to the problem area/existing way of doing things

Step 2: Think of what would the opposite of the answer to above question would look like

Step 3: Think of solutions that will render the above flipped answer sensible

Don’t worry, if you don’t get it from the above explanation. Just go through the examples given ahead and you’ll understand how easy it is.

Disclaimer: There’s no guarantee that you’ll find the solution to your problem at the first go, but it’s definitely bound to force you to think laterally and consolidate your thoughts in the form of sometimes hilarious and sometimes brilliant ideas. Whatever be the outcome, if you are like me, the fun of thinking is worth it.

Example #1: Flipping an alarm clock

Looking around while writing this blog, I saw the alarm clock on my desk. What new ideas can we generate if use Flip-It! on an alarm clock. Let’s ask the questions.

Step 1: Ask an obvious question

What does an alarm clock do? It helps people wake up at a specified time.

Step 2: Think of what would be the opposite of above answer

What’s the opposite of waking up? Going to sleep

Step 3: Think of solutions that will provide sense to above answer

Can there be something that helps people go to sleep. Can I achieve that with an alarm clock? Maybe I can add soothing lights and music features to the alarm clock. Whoa! A new product idea. A sleep management device that helps me sleep on time, wake up on time and maintain a healthy sleeping cycle.

Example #2: Flipping a hand dryer

Flip-It on Hand DryerSuppose you are a product manager working with Dyson and you need to think of a product line extension for your Airblade hand dryers. Let’s see what ideas can we come up with Flip-It!

Step 1: Ask an obvious question

What does a hand dryer do? It dries up the users hands

Step 2: Think of what would be the opposite of above answer

What’s the opposite of drying up hands? Make the hands wet

Step 3: Think of solutions that will provide sense to above answer

Why would the users be interested in making their hands wet? Maybe if we add a water spray in addition to the air nozzle… Whoa! I can also add a foam spray. What if there was a product where I just put my hands and it comes out washed and dried. Nice, let’s create an all-in-one hand sanitation device.

Example #3: Flipping a food delivery app

Now, pick up any app on your phone and put it through this exercise and see if we can come up with a new app idea. I am picking up Zomato, a popular restaurant discovery and food delivery app.

Step 1: Ask an obvious question

What does Zomato do? Basically, it helps me get food delivered to my home.

Step 2: Think of what would be the opposite of above answer

What can be the opposite of getting food delivered at my doorstep? Maybe something that takes away food from my home.

Step 3: Think of solutions that will provide sense to above answer

In what situations would I want someone to show up and take away food from me? Maybe it can be done to give away leftover or fresh food parcels for charity, which many people already do occasionally. If an easier way is made available, they might do it even more often. Idea! Food delivery services can add a feature for users where any delivery boy while delivering food would also pick up any leftover food and drop it off at a designated zone where anyone in need can pick up the food.

Note: Notice how the end result after using Flip-It! exercise is not a competing or opposite product, but rather an extension to the existing product capabilities.

Closing Comments

I know that the examples that I have picked up are quite product centric (maybe because that’s what I do professionally), but I apply this exercise across a lot of situations. What to gift to my wife? What information to include on my resume? What’s the meaning of life! Sometimes I get really good answers, sometimes a good laugh. But there’s no doubt that the exercise forces you to think laterally and build your creative muscles. So go on, give it a try.

I would really appreciate if you could share some examples of how you applied it in a real life situation. Alternatively, you can suggest me some problems and I’ll be happy to share how I would apply the steps to come up with new ideas. Happy Thinking!