TUSHAR  JAIN

When people hear “500+ user conversations,” they imagine a massive research project. In reality, these conversations were spread across five years, across multiple product contexts, and across different motivations - discovery, validation, feedback, UAT, rejection, and diagnosis. These conversations ultimately changed how I judge problems, how I evaluate user claims, and how I decide whether a feature deserves even a single hour of engineering bandwidth or not. Table of Conte

Most early teams do not fail because they move slow. They fail because they move fast in the wrong direction, burn through conviction, cash, and clarity… and then realise too late that the foundation they built on speed was never built on truth. I learnt this the hard way - both while building a D2C brand and while working with early-stage teams as a PM. Every time something collapsed, speed looked like the villain. But it wasn’t speed. It was an unexamined speed. Table of Co

When people talk about zero-to-one products, they usually talk about frameworks, funnels, MVPs, and speed. But nothing teaches you 0 - to - 1 thinking like building a business with your own money, no team, no visibility, no network, and no external support. My five years building a marketplace-first business and then attempting a D2C brand taught me lessons that no product course, company playbook or growth template ever revealed. These lessons were not theoretical. They came

Founders and first-time product managers rarely struggle with generating ideas. They struggle with recognising which of those ideas actually deserve to exist. In reality, most ideas sound promising when said out loud, look neat on a whiteboard, and even make sense logically. But so do movie plots and TED talks. The real trouble starts when you ask the only question that matters: Do users genuinely feel this problem deeply enough to change their behaviour? Through my years of

Before I formally entered product management, I did not announce to myself or to anyone that I was “transitioning into product.” In fact, for a very long time, I resisted even calling it a transition. I was coming from a world where decisions were immediate, consequences were direct, and ownership was absolute. As a founder, if something worked, it worked because I made it so. If something failed, the responsibility ended with me. There was a certain raw honesty in that life.

Every founder, PM, or early builder knows this feeling: you come up with an idea. It sounds clean. Logical. Convincing. Even exciting. You share it with a friend, they nod.  You pitch it to a colleague, they agree. You write a quick problem statement, it makes complete sense. And then you put the idea in front of a real user… and suddenly nothing behaves the way you expected. They skip the feature you thought would be the star. They get stuck on something you assumed was obvi

Most PM transitions fail not because of skill but because of poor timing, weak runway, and hidden risk. Here’s how to design your product management transition based on real constraints, not copied playbooks.

Chasing product management for salary alone leads to early burnout and stalled growth. Here’s what actually sustains long-term success in PM and why motivation matters more than compensation.