the rooms get bigger
Getting more senior was supposed to mean having more of the answers. It meant ending up in more rooms where I didn’t, and arriving there faster.
Why becoming more senior changed the way I learn.
Getting more senior was supposed to mean I’d have more of the answers.
What actually happened is that I ended up in more rooms where I didn’t.
In 2010 I took my first job in consulting, in an office in HITEC City. The firm pulled talent from every corner of India – IITs, IIMs, people who thought in ways I hadn’t yet. I’d grown up believing engineering or medicine were the only roads worth taking. That room ended the idea inside a month.
I’ve been measuring myself against bigger rooms since.
The difference between then and now is that the 2010 room found me. Every one after it, I’ve had to go and find.
For most of my career I learned by reading something and using it that week.
Don’t Make Me Think is the clearest example. I read it, and the way I critiqued an interface changed. Then after a while the critique stopped being deliberate. It went subconscious – I’d look at a screen and know what was wrong with it before I’d worked out why. That’s the real test of whether you learned something. You stop having to remember it.
Krug and Norman gave me usability and taste. The Mom Test and Teresa Torres gave me discovery and research, years later, after I’d learned the hard way that I needed them. Sprint. Inspired. A lot of blogs.
Almost no certificates in all of it. I didn’t need any. Product management is application – I had the experience, and everything I read could be used at work the same week.
Then I moved into leadership, and the work started changing shape faster than it used to.
A different engagement archetype every few months. Different domain, different constraints, a different definition of what good looks like. And a level where you’re expected to have a point of view on day one rather than after discovery.
Reading is paced to the reader. Those rooms weren’t.
That’s the honest reason the certificates start piling up from 2023 after thirteen years of almost none. It wasn’t a plan, and it wasn’t worry about AI. The pace changed, and reading in the margins stopped being able to keep up with it.
I should say plainly: none of what follows was full-time. I was working the whole way through. The executive general management program was long distance with weekends in person, and everything since has been remote and self-paced, done in evenings and on weekends. Nobody gave me a year off to catch up.
So I went at three things at once. Machine learning, human behaviour, and design thinking.
Machine learning first. I started with AI For Everyone, which is an overview, and an overview wasn’t enough. A map tells you the roads exist. It doesn’t tell you which one backs up at six.
So I did the Stanford machine learning specialization – all four courses, about four months, alongside the job.
Not all of it earned its time. Unsupervised learning is the part I wouldn’t do again.
I’m saying that on purpose. A list of courses with nothing bad in it isn’t a list, it’s a brochure.
All thanks to the certification, I started thinking about data all the time, the feature-set, the predictor and target variables, viewing the large language models with a lens of fundamental concepts like the weights and parameters
Human behaviour next. The Behavioural Design Academy. I already knew what I wanted out of a flow – fewest steps, clarity of intent, nothing on the screen that doesn’t need to be there. What I didn’t have was the technique to get there reliably instead of by feel.
Now I can name why a screen creates choice paralysis instead of just sensing that it does. And I can cut information that’s sitting there out of habit rather than need.
It didn’t change what I was aiming at. It changed how often I hit it.
Design thinking third. Design thinking from MIT Sloan in 2023, and again from Kellogg in 2026.
One of those on its own gives you a direction. Three of them give you a position.
The second design thinking course is the one that needs explaining. I’d already done one. I was running a studio of 350 people across design, product and engineering. On paper I had no business signing up for another.
By 2026 AI is being pushed into every part of the design process. Synthetic personas. Interviews. Research. Insights. User flows. Information architecture. Visual aesthetics. There’s a tool for all of it and someone confident telling you to use it.
And almost everyone with a strong opinion on it has something to sell.
So I went and asked a university instead. Not to learn how to use AI – I can do that. I wanted an academic view on where it belongs in the process, and more usefully, where it doesn’t. I wanted to unlearn and re-learn what academia thinks.
That’s a different question from the one the tools are answering. The tools are answering “can this be automated ?”. The question I care about is “should it be ?”, and “what do you lose if it is ?”
Nothing on that list certifies me at the job I already do.
That’s deliberate. There’s no product management certificate in there, because product management is application. I have the experience and I read constantly, and a badge wouldn’t add anything to either. Everything I went and studied sits next to the work rather than on top of it.
Here’s why that matters more now than it did five years ago.
The tools got good. Building is easier than it’s been at any point in my career – I’ve written about that already. But easier building doesn’t make the knowledge underneath it less valuable. It makes it worth more. If a tool can produce the thing, what’s left is knowing what to ask it for, and knowing whether what came back is right.
That judgement isn’t in the tool. It’s the part you still have to go and get.
I’m not going to tell you to go and learn machine learning.
I don’t think every senior product person needs a machine learning specialization. This is my path, not a recommendation. Plenty of people I respect got where they are on completely different reading.
What I’d say instead is that seniority never stopped putting me in rooms I wasn’t ready for. It just made them arrive faster.
The old constraints kept me from starting.
What I can go and learn now keeps me from stopping.
I’ll take that trade.