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Understanding of your organizations ways of working and making connections across teams.

Understanding how your organization works: This is not about sucking up to 'important' people (atleast not when it concerns productivity). This has got to do with understanding which how the different organizational parts work, so that you can be most effective. e.g. There's tons of planning for resources/budgets that happen once in a year and if you are aware and can put in your requirements into that list, it would help.

Making connections across teams: In large and complex organizations/products, a lot of knowledge is tribal. It helps to have friendly relations and people whom you could chat with informally in teams that you depend on. Many conflicts can be resolved faster.

An apartment association is a legally recognized body, which collects service fee and pays service taxes too!

Large apartment associations employ few staff on own payroll, but mostly Security, Housekeeping, Plumbers, Electricians, STP operators,etc are on the payrolls of manpower agencies.

Members of the association are owners of individual flats. Tenants do not participate much ( and not encouraged either). This ensures a skin in the game and service fee goes towards activities contributing to long term value of the property (including liveability).

Managing an apartment complex (pro-bono) alongside a tech job. In Bangalore, it is normal to have a committee of apartment owners who oversee the operations, set up rules for residents, take up mini-projects for efficiency / beautification /long term maintenance and also manage the finances. This committee operates for a year and then passes on the reins to the next committee.

Our apartment complex has 850 apartments. This scale has interesting challenges:

- Communication (mostly Whatsapp, sometimes email) : how residents with different language abilities understand/misunderstand instructions and announcements

- Managing outages of electricity, water, lifts for maintenance ( Childrens exams, residents with medical conditions, work from home)

- Employee politics and the need to break up unholy alliances ( e.g. Employee tie-up with particular vendor, some employees creating emergencies so that some large expenses are quickly approved, one group purposely slowing down a diligent employee)

From a tech perspective, it's the machinery and equipment that is interesting

- distribution of water, electricity, gas

- Sewage treatment plant

Since ours is a 10+ year old apartment complex, almost all of the equipment needs some work and there are frequent failures. It requires the committee to understand and make decisions about quick fixes vs long term , validate costs of fixing and manage inconvenience caused by outages.

4 months in, this has been a great experience outside of the usual tech company issues :)

Please share your techniques to train your hyperfocus.

I am currently willing to try anything (except drugs) to help my attention. Pomodoro and meditation have helped me enormously in the past. But now, with kids at home, everything has taken a beating.

The difference between Amazon and Chinese manufacturers is also that Amazon controls the search listing, it controls which reviews are allowed to be present on its platform and in many cases, can influence when and how a competitor product is shipped to the customer.

Do normal households and small businesses keep track of prices ? Are they able to cap their bills in any way ?

In my country, where I live, the per unit prices are fixed and any increases are announced. I doubt whether people anywhere could keep up with 10-30x changes in prices.

If one were to decompile and check what the app is doing, I'd guess it would still be a good idea to not say so on a public forum. Especially, in cases where there is so much public attention. :)

True story: One day, an assistant professor (and a first time teacher) came to class and announced that there would be a "surprise test" on so-and-so day. Not just that, the questions asked would be 5 out of 8 possible pre-announced questions.

On the day of the test, the professor wrote the questions on the board and then left the room. Almost every student in the class cheated. Some came with chits to copy from. Some copied from others. Legends though, they came with pre-written answer sheets for each of the 8 questions and attached answers for the 5 questions which were asked.

Prompting to 'go deeper' could potentially be done over a video call. I hope LabCorp does some sort of beta testing to know how well people do with instructions.

While speculations and early reports of possible sale of Uber Eats were coming, as a user one could see hefty discounts of upto 50% capped at over Rs.200 in the last 3-4 months.

It is not easy for drivers to quit given the debt that they've taken on. It is tougher to operate as an independent taxi driver than to be on a platform. Many of the drivers I have spoken to have migrated from smaller cities and I doubt it would be easy for them to operate independently.

Pomodoro technique - Takes a few minutes to learn and setup an app. It has helped me be super productive with tasks requiring concentration.

Role : Product Manager

Location: Bangalore

Remote: OK but onsite preferred

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies/Skills: Machine Learning, Data Visualization, Javascript, Python, Pandas, SQL, REST APIs, Google Analytics, AWS, Web Maps, experimented with voice interfaces, User Research, UX

Résumé/CV: available on request

Email: desai.sid+HN (at) gmail com

Currently Technical PM, previously SW architect(distributed systems, high availability, automation). Grew a UX practice (team & processes) from scratch. Have UX turnarounds, quality improvement projects, high technical risks projects under my belt. Led teams of 5-12 person size. Some bit of marketing and presales.

In India, Flipkart ( an e-commerce company) gives you an option to leave the package with a nearby shop (which would have signed up as a partner). Maybe you could try working out something with a shop-owner nearby (and one day scale it as a solution :) )