April 8, 2022

Map of Interests: Version 1

Prologue

I started following the work of Visakanv around 2020. I happened to chance upon his work while doing the usual, browsing twitter unendingly. In his profile, he has this mind map of memex where everything that is of interest to him is mapped.

Since then I have been curious to figure out what could be my interests. It has always baffled me that why I couldn't be a linear figure in my career execution. Focused, targeted and grow gradually like steps leading to the next floor. It would have made many folks in my family a lot happier.

Like I mentioned in the anchor post, doing things the easy way was not something that interested me. So, here I am, after being relieved of my duty as a founder and accepting my reality as an operator, settling in my next stint. It provides me with ample opportunity to reflect, reassess and reaffirm my notions and beliefs.

Map of Interests V1

The first version was the listing of my interests as form of petals of a flower. It signifies the overlap across topics and also showed equal importance to each topic.

Listing out the topics of interest:

1. Agri-space

2. Logistics

3. Marketplaces

4. Entrepreneurship

5. Product Development

6. Leadership

The interest in each of these comes from the work I have done in the past. The next thing I did was map the overlaps between two adjacent petals. This brings us to the set of overlapping topics that would signify the areas of interests I would like to pursue further.

• Service Design:

  • Both Agri and Logistics are complex domains. They cannot be defined to the fullest due to the type of ever changing nature of their functioning. Though, the fundamental blocks of both the domains are pretty easy to understand, challenges arise when things are interconnected.

  • Designing these complex interactions and providing neccessary tools to help design these interactions would fall under service design. Product design is a sub-set of service design[1].

• Commodity Marketplaces :

  • Marketplaces are modern markets that all of us experience. We interact with the one that our state devised through policy in physical space. Yet, which have maximum influence over our day to day lives are the digital marketplaces. Like the app stores, digital stores or multiple other digital services we access.

  • Agri is one space that is bereft of any true digital native marketplaces. The version 1 of such marketplaces will be a commodity marketplaces. This is what drew me into the agri vortex and still keeps me engaged.

• Platform Economies:

  • I am a sucker for smarter articulation via definitions and frameworks. Stratechery had one on aggregators and platforms[2]. Since reading those articles and understanding the framework through various examples. I dreamt of building a platform marketplace.

  • Trying to build one with our efforts at Pipehaul. The realisation has been that you are defining an economy itself. Why economy and why not marketplace? The simple answer is that in an economy you also define the what is "success" by the metric measured whereas in a marketplace, you have no such privilege.

• Product Driven:

  • Product Development has been a fascinating exploration for me personally. Being a product designer and then turing into a product owner has not been the easiest of transitions.

  • Especially, since the work you do is similar to a conductor of an orchestra. Getting it right sounds and looks melodious and granduer but getting it there is set of countless tradeoff, persistent practice and mutlitple re-framings.

  • Product development is the outcome. Getting to the outcome requires rethining at a fundamental layer about the problem and process with which we are looking solve. Breaking it down into fragments and connecting them through a product's journey becomes critical in defining your value proposition and being product driven.

• Continuous || Domain oriented:

  • Ms Torres wrote a book called Continous discovery[3]. This was my inspiration for framing of this overlapping topic. Product Management with the focus on discovery and then defining it coherently has proved to be a successful trope I deployed. Making it widely understood while learning the skills to become better in discovery and articulation.

  • This emphasis on discovery comes with the underlying notion that the domain where the product is being developed is of interest. Without alignment of one's interst with the domain, generating curiousity becomes awefully tiring as time passes.

• Decetralised

  • This one in all honesty just came in the moment while creating the info-graph.

  • Leadership combined with logistics is tough combination to explain in clear terms. Traditionally all logistics like policing are required to run through a central control centre. One set of operators to whom everyone reports by logging information of their respective functions and regions.

  • In logistics supply chains which we tried to build with Pipehaul, we wanted to flip the concept of control on its head. The outward person of the network has the context and knowledge to make the right decision. Then the question entails what is required to provide such a nature of decision making where decentralisation is not power depleting but rather compounding.

Conclusion

Once I finished the plot, i tried to comprehend the nature of importance of each of these topics. Current representation puts them to be equal which is not what i intended. This is when I realised we need to chose a different representational form to document the interlude of topics. Also, a chance to refine the interests which i will address once again in a future post.

Signing off till next time, Vivek

---

References

[1]: Service Design [2]: Aggregators and Platforms [3]: Book Link