How to think when the product is YOU?

This post is an attempt to share my perspective on designing your life with the same rigour we build products and businesses in the tech.

As a creative product person, you build products that can develop into a strategically large defensible business. To achieve this goal, you use intuition, market research, data, and love solving a particular problem for a customer segment. Your success depends on how accurately you can predict what the customer wants or will want in 1/2/3 years from now. Better accuracy here leads to good judgment which shows up in love showered for your product leading to a fast growing business. Finally, you put in the operational rigour of monthly, quarterly targets and find creative solutions to keep moving towards the target. The key insight here is that when you are looking so far ahead in the future, you have to focus on needs that are timeless to build a long-term strategy.

The same creative however rarely thinks about their life this way and operates daily with the same rigour. Visualise yourself as two people - you as the product manager(let’s call this P) and you as the customer(let’s call this C). From here on life gets simpler, we can transfer all our insights into this domain and P can pose a question for C - What would C want in 1/5/10 years from now?

Most likely, you, the customer, will have answers that would map into the following output metrics

1. HAPPINESS - Retain calm ‘x’ hours/day. When you are calm, you have less/no fear and that's a happy state of mind.
2. HEALTH - Have a resting heart of ‘Y’ beats/min. This is a great metrics to measure the long-term effect of any workout.
3. MONEY - Have $X net-worth and generate $Z monthly income.

From here on, you need to design the levers or inputs which will help you hit these metrics.

Dependency and Priority in Output metrics

For Happiness, ask yourself two questions -

1. What does my happiness DEPEND upon?
2. What is stopping me from doing that?

As an example, your happiness may depend on your family and their output metrics of happiness may or may not be a calm mind. It could be an intermediate feeling of excitement achieved through buying things often confused as happiness. There is no judgment here, you should optimise for your metrics, whatever they may be as conflict between the heart and mind leads to stress. Prioritise health, happiness and money in the order that works for you as sometimes life will present you choices where you may only be able to have some.

Core Tenet for designing the input levers

What can you do everyday without a push.

Designing the Input Levers

Health

There are many ways to achieve a lower resting heart rate. You could choose from biking, swimming, weight-training, mountaineering, yoga and many other forms of sports. Choose what your heart desires the most.

Happiness

At some point, you will realise that the only true measure of happiness is a calm mind. Having a calm mind dealing with the world is harder than going to the Himalayas and getting there. Choose what you desire the most from meditation, yoga and spending time with family

Money

Growing your existing money is not the focus of this section. The focus is to increase your input. Experiment and find what you are good at, what you care (generates drive) and what the world needs in that order. Choose wisely and bet your life on it.

What you measure, you improve

To build rigour, convert everything into numbers and targets.

Target Output Metrics

Input Metrics

You will need forcing functions

We only work our best when we have a forcing function. As we ponder on this you will realise the fundamental gaps in our education system. The way we learn is so boring that we only apply ourselves fully when there is an exam. Years of conditioning does influence how we approach life. You can setup a monthly review of your targets in a closed and intimate community.

Does it limit Curiosity?

Be rigorous on output and curious to experiment and change the input levers.