E182 · Blind Spots To Big Bets

Shrinath V: We keep hearing news today about someone getting laid off from Google or Meta after fifteen years, and the newspapers paint it as doom and gloom. I kept thinking — that's okay. They've drawn a salary all this time, they probably have their stock, they're not out on the road. I've had two layoffs in my career, both from companies that were supposedly built to last. One was Motorola, the second was Nokia.

Srikanth: There's a particular kind of problem that doesn't announce itself. It doesn't show up in your performance review. It doesn't send a warning. It just quietly shapes every decision you make — your next career move, the business bet you're about to take, the assumption you stopped questioning years ago. It's called a blind spot. And the troubling thing about blind spots, the thing that makes them genuinely dangerous, is that the smarter you are, the harder they are to see.

Srikanth: My guest today has spent nearly two decades helping leaders, founders and product teams do one thing: see what they're missing before the cost of missing it becomes impossible to ignore. He built global products at Nokia, Texas Instruments, Motorola and MapmyIndia. He's advised CXOs at some of India's best-known companies, mentored startups at Google for Startups, and writes a Substack called *Blind Spots to Big Bets* that has been shaping how thoughtful people think about careers, technology and decisions for over five years.

What I love about this conversation is that at no point does it let you off the hook. We talk about why the most experienced people in any room often have the biggest blind spots; why India's real superpower in the age of AI might be something we've been undervaluing for decades; and why the education system isn't failing — it's succeeding at the wrong thing. Welcome to the show, Shrinath.

Shrinath V: Thank you. I've been looking at what you've been doing, some of the conversations you've had — phenomenal. I appreciate the effort you put into inspiring others. Happy to be here.

Srikanth: You've spent time inside Nokia, Texas Instruments, Motorola — celebrated tech companies. What did that world teach you that no MBA could?

Shrinath V: Texas Instruments was before my MBA, so let me expand the question slightly: I'd also like to talk about what it taught me that my engineering course didn't.

I did my engineering at NIT Calicut — back then REC Calicut. Like most engineering graduates you come out feeling ready for industry. When I first joined, everything seemed very difficult and I kept wondering whether I was in the wrong place. Today we'd call that imposter syndrome, but reflecting back I think the real gap is still there: engineering teaches you to build software, but it doesn't teach you *systems*. It doesn't teach you how large companies run, or how your work fits into a larger network of components that ultimately becomes a product. Building a mental model of that takes a while. Once you do, you realise it isn't about being an individual contributor or a manager — it's about how the whole thing is shaped. I spent four years at TI building that realisation. It was one of the real product companies in India at the time, doing genuinely interesting work, and this was almost twenty-five years ago.

At some point I decided I didn't want to be an engineer all my life, and that's when I did my MBA.

Shrinath V: After the MBA I again felt I'd learned all the theories, done the research and the internship, and knew how to navigate the world. Then came my first meeting at Motorola India — 2007, when Motorola was still a large challenger brand to Nokia. I was heading product marketing for a set of phones. We were in a supply-chain planning meeting and someone asked how much we'd sell. The sales guy said, "I'll sell 30,000." Then: "Drop the price by 2,000 and I'll get you another 10,000 pieces." I'm sitting there thinking — all these theories I learned about supply chain and marketing, and this is what it comes down to? A small negotiation between leaders at quarter end. That's when you realise how unprepared we are when we get into the job.

A lot of my Motorola time was learning about the real world. I spent a lot of it walking the streets, meeting customers, vendors, people selling phones, distributors. It gave me a great sense of how India actually works.

Shrinath V: After Motorola I was at MapmyIndia for a while — they made GPS navigators, and were much smaller then. Fresh MBA graduates who join as freshers usually get a management trainee rotation that lets them understand a large company; I'd joined as a lateral hire, so I never had that. I joined MapmyIndia when it wasn't yet cool to call it a startup, but that's what it was: I was doing everything from running the Bangalore office to managing the GPS portfolio, getting surveys done, handling sales down south. That was my stint learning how the startup world works — how you do everything on your own.

Then Nokia, back in R&D, heading product management for Maps across a series of Nokia phones. A very different Nokia than the one we remember now. What Nokia taught me that nothing else could was multiculturalism. People look at Nokia today as an example of what not to do — "how could they not see this?" — and I know quite a bit of the internal story. But my memory of Nokia is colleagues from all over the world. My boss was Estonian; my colleagues were German, Singaporean, Danish. What I learned was how different cultures approach work and professionalism, and how you engage with all of them.

Srikanth: Those pivots were significant — TI to Motorola, the MBA, Nokia, then the startup and consulting world. In each of those jumps, what surprised you most?

Shrinath V: Let me first talk about why the jumps happened at all. I've had two layoffs, both from companies supposedly built to last.

Motorola was 2008, right around the global financial crisis. Motorola wasn't doing well even before that — many of us could see the organisational structure problems, simple things taking far too long. A new global CEO came in and said we can't fix everything at once, so North America is the core market and we'll let people go elsewhere. That meant a lot of people in India. I had just moved to Bangalore. I still remember the day: all of us sitting around, each one getting a call — my boss was elsewhere — saying, "I'm sorry, we need to let you go." Back then there was no precedent for losing a job this way. My landlord said, "If you can't pay the rent this month, it's okay, I understand." I thanked him and said I wasn't in such dire straits.

That was a big shift. I'd envisioned a career of several years with that company, and then something happened I didn't control. It wasn't performance-related; it was chance. I couldn't have done anything differently. So — what next? I was clear I wanted to get back to product. I got calls from services companies and said I really wasn't interested. That's when I joined MapmyIndia.

A year and a half or two later we started hearing Nokia wasn't doing well. We'd got a new CEO from Microsoft, and at one point the company said it was throwing its weight behind the Microsoft bet, so people working on other things would be let go. In 2013 I faced my second layoff. This time it was a fairly large team — a big R&D team in India, with people reporting to me here and in Poland. We were sitting together with the VP on a telecall saying, "We're going to let all of you go." I was telling my team it seems okay now, but reality hits you when your head hits the pillow. That's when you wonder what you do next. Nokia did give most of us the option to join other teams inside the company, and several of my colleagues did.

Shrinath V: I just felt I'd seen this world where large companies let you go for no performance reason, only because the market shifts. I wanted to try consulting on my own — and that's how the journey began. I really didn't have a plan. It's been thirteen years now and I still don't have a plan. I gave myself six months, said let me try and see what happens, I have enough of a buffer. That's how it started. All of it has been an experiment with my career, if you can call it that.

Srikanth: Steve Jobs famously talks about connecting the dots backwards — some of these things were meant to happen the way they did.

Shrinath V: I don't know about the world, but I do know about myself. Looking back, how my thinking changed came from getting into projects where in the first few weeks I'm literally tearing out whatever hair is left, wondering why I took this on because I can't understand it. Then in a few weeks I start getting a sense of the whole thing and can move forward. I've always picked up projects in domains I hadn't worked in before.

Some of that confidence comes from having already been through what other people fear — the layoffs. If at some point I have to go back to a job and get laid off again, it doesn't seem as scary. In fact, in today's world it's probably scarier to be in a job and not know what the world outside looks like than the other way around.

The second thing: choose the right partner. I've been very fortunate. My wife has been fantastic — she's the one holding the stable job that allows me to experiment.

Srikanth: Your Substack is called *Blind Spots to Big Bets*. Where did the phrase come from — a realisation about yourself first, or about others?

Shrinath V: I started the blog last year, but I'd been mulling the topic for a while. For over ten years I've coached people at different companies — product coaching, though I say "used to" now because I'm spending most of my time on AI. A lot of that work was looking at how product teams function so they get more efficient.

What I realised is that it was never that I was smarter than anyone else — these are large companies I've had the privilege to work with. What mattered was that I could see something they couldn't, because my perspective was different. Having spent so much time *outside* organisations, I start seeing patterns within organisations that people inside usually struggle to see.

That's when it clicked: the challenge most companies have — and most individuals — is blind spots. Things we don't know exist. We're not able to see them; we genuinely don't know. A lot of my time goes into helping companies uncover these and say, look, here are options and opportunities. And if you're able to see, that's the first step toward taking a very different bet.

It's more relevant now than earlier. The world outside is changing, and when change is that rapid you don't have certainty — you're only taking calculated bets. If you uncover your blind spots, you're then in a position to take a big bet, as an individual or a company. That's where the title came from.

Srikanth: Why do people miss the obvious? Is it ignoring the dots consciously, or not being able to pay attention?

Shrinath V: Take the first part — why do we have blind spots at all? Even when driving you have blind spots. They're just areas you can't see. It's not that you don't want to see them.

There are two ways to look at it: are you *unable* to see something, or *unwilling* to see it? If you're unable to see it, you need a coach who comes in and says, "Something's blocking you." If you're unwilling to see it, something inside you is stopping you — then you need a mentor. I play both roles.

The reason companies can't see this is that we're all creatures of conditioning. We have context around us, we're all busy, and we're forced into patterns by the way our organisational systems behave. That very often doesn't give us the luxury of *time* or *distance* — and both are required. You need time and you need distance from the situation to look at it dispassionately and ask what you're missing.

It's difficult for individuals and leaders because we're also emotional. We have a real emotional connection with the work we did, so it's hard to analyse your own work. In many cases I feel I need someone else to do it for me too. Being able to get coaches or mentors who help you look at things differently — and being willing to let go — makes a huge difference.

Srikanth: You've said companies chasing NPS scores, building AI-first strategies, obsessing over personas or AI usage — all of these are traps. What's the common thread?

Shrinath V: There are a few challenges with companies. The first is inertia — you don't want to change how you are because it takes too much effort. The second is incentives. In most companies incentives are layered on measurable elements. There's a great book called *Measure What Matters*; what gets missed is that when you measure what doesn't matter, you sometimes ignore what *cannot* be measured.

NPS is very easy to measure, but it's a lossy metric. I coach teams who come to me saying, "I got a low NPS." Usually what I do is go back and analyse it.

Shrinath V: I keep telling product managers: the most dangerous thing you have is a customer — and nobody sees it. You ask a set of questions, and once a customer tells you something it becomes gospel truth, unshakeable. "But the customer told us" — and it percolates down the organisation. What usually happens is you don't know what questions to ask, and you're reacting to an outcome.

In a large company you're never building fresh. It's almost always building on legacy, and when you build on legacy there are always metrics hanging over you. You're building a product, but what will the NPS be? So you engineer everything to keep NPS okay, without analysing why things are the way they are.

I was coaching a company building accounting solutions. They were getting low NPS and kept asking what to optimise in the product. I said let's go have a conversation with these customers first — I helped them build a structured guide, did a couple of mock interviews, and sent them out. What came back was that many respondents were unhappy about their *payment incentives*, which had nothing to do with the accounting solution. The NPS question was simply the first place they could give feedback. They weren't even reading what they were being asked about — they came from an accounts-payment stream, something was wrong, so they gave a low score.

I told them: this is not a product problem. You cannot resolve it by making your product better. This is an organisational problem — connect them to the right people and find out whether it works for them or what needs to change.

Shrinath V: I see the same thing in user personas and customer research. You speak to a couple of users and come back saying you know who your user is. We don't realise that distilling complex humans into one slide — name, age, a very pretty layout — is absolutely useless. In fact it's more than useless, it's dangerous, because everyone then anchors on it as who the customer is.

I was coaching a team in the education space working with teachers. They showed me their persona: a woman in her mid-thirties with two children, aged four and seven. Their story was that she'd go to school, come back, her husband and mother-in-law would help, and she'd get her school work done — and they'd shaped the product around that.

But in India, if a woman has children of four and seven, how old is she likely to be? Not more than her late twenties. And why does she choose a school in the first place? This is a reality many of us in urban India don't see: once the child starts school, she can start her career again — and when she does, her options are limited because she needs to be home before the children are done, and take care of them, because there's no support net. Some families are supportive; many aren't. Becoming a teacher is a very good option in that case.

So all the reasons *why* someone becomes a teacher, what a teacher's life is actually like, what happens in a school, what goes on between parents, teachers, the principal and the school management — we lose all of that the moment we compress it into a persona. That becomes a huge blind spot. And AI is its own trap, which we can come to later.

Srikanth: What have you observed as the common traits of blind spots — and can an individual develop the ability to spot them?

Shrinath V: One trait: given a new problem, you feel "oh, I know how to solve this." There are two kinds of expertise — expertise of *depth* and expertise of *breadth*. For most of us it's depth. We spend years or decades building expertise in one domain, and after a while it becomes subconscious pattern matching: "I've seen this before."

That's also why you get organisational friction between youngsters joining a company and middle or senior management. The first thing a young joiner is told is, "That's not how it works here." That's a symptom of people being conditioned to see things one way. As a senior leader, it's a great opportunity to ask what youngsters know that you don't. I have a cousin seventeen years younger than me and I think of him as a reverse mentor — he sees a world I will never be able to see and reacts to it very differently. It's always interesting to step back and ask why he's doing something I wouldn't consider rational. Most of us fall into the trap of thinking there is one rational way of doing things and everyone else has got it wrong. That's the number one source of blind spots. Observing others, seeing why they decide differently and how it's working for them — that's where it starts.

Shrinath V: I've been a mentor with Google for Startups for almost ten years now, so I've seen a lot of startups, and I also see enterprises. A lot of my work is connecting those blocks. Startups approach the world very differently from enterprises, and there's knowledge on both sides — there's just no conduit between them. So I go to larger companies and say, "This is how startups are thinking." Initially there's pushback — "that works for a startup, not for us" — but then you get an opening: "oh, is this possible?" For startups it works the other way around.

Srikanth: Does scale get in the way? Large organisations are too big to identify blind spots, or too difficult to manoeuvre even once they do — whereas startups are nimble and agile, so they spot them more easily. Is that hypothesis completely wrong?

Shrinath V: No, that absolutely plays a role — and I'd say there are two elements. One is that the scale is so large it's like steering an ocean liner versus a small boat. It takes enormous energy, and you need a tick mark from a lot of people. There's a famous line in the Hindi film *Deewaar* where the character is told to get everyone else's signature first, and then he'll sign. That's exactly what large companies are like: if you want to change something, first this person has to change, then that one, then another — you're trying to shift an entire mindset, and that takes a lot of energy.

The second is incentives again. In a large firm, when do you get rewarded? For making sure you don't rock the boat. Internal systems control disruption; disruption is a threat, not an opportunity. So you're rewarded for managing it, not taking it head on. For a startup, disruption is the opportunity — "I could never have entered this domain before, but now it's possible, so why don't I?"

Srikanth: Curiosity seems to be a key element in overcoming blind spots.

Shrinath V: Sometimes we underestimate the importance of the first job in a career. My hypothesis is that in your first job you're actually pushed to work hard — and I know that's against the grain right now when everyone's talking about work-life balance. I don't mean being squeezed for no reason or having terrible bosses. I mean that if you're pushed to think and pushed to do things differently, you start forming habits.

At Texas Instruments I had really sharp colleagues, and in the middle of discussions I'd think, "I don't know how they're able to make these points, and I'm not." So I stepped back and asked what they were doing to get there — because it's not as if they came up with ideas out of nowhere. Studying people became a habit.

But it's not just curiosity, it's *what* you're curious about. You can be curious about other people, in which case it becomes gossip. Or you can be curious about ideas, in which case it becomes fuel for imagination — asking how something is happening, how to decode it.

Shrinath V: Most of us now have long careers, and your willingness and ability to work is much higher than it used to be. A generation ago people said at sixty, "golden years, I'm done, I'm retired." For many of us, health permitting, we'd love to keep doing something interesting. When you have such a long time frame, what you need is curiosity — and something to stay curious about.

Srikanth: What do you do to keep your curiosity quotient high?

Shrinath V: I love to play — and play for me isn't sport, it's playing with ideas. It's about knowing yourself. For me it's always the lure of the unsolved problem. If I've done something once, doing it again doesn't interest me — which is contrary to the world I come from, product, where you try to do something once and repeat it many times. I like unsolved problems and playing with possibilities, which is what I'm doing with AI right now.

I've actually taken time off this past year. This is an opportunity most of us are getting — a golden window where we have access to these tools and enough context to play. Personally it's been a lot of things I couldn't do earlier that I'm doing now, and as I do them, I discover.

Srikanth: Companies are declaring "AI-first" as their strategy, and employees are going down the same path — "let me learn AI." In my growing-up years everybody went for a Java class; now everybody goes for an AI class, without asking whether it's the right thing to do.

Shrinath V: It's fear of obsolescence driving most people — it's a tectonic shift and you want to be on the right side. The other thing is that India is largely a certificate market. We want enough certificates on the CV and on LinkedIn so other people recognise us as experts, and the easiest way is to take a course and get a certification.

For most companies the bigger trap is that they're not doing a fundamental re-evaluation of how the world is changing. A lot of the AI-first push is led by technology people, which I think is a huge mistake, because they frame it as doing things faster. Listen to the murmur right now and it's all about getting more done, more tokens, token-maxing — everything is about technology. Companies are not about technology. They're about business, about processes. Unless you get down to the fundamentals — how is my business going to change, which of my processes are now redundant, how do I change for that, and how do I make the change without freaking out most of my organisation — you're not doing the work.

Things like measuring people by how much AI they use are actively causing damage, because it becomes performative.

Shrinath V: Everyone says, "You want me to do something with AI? I'll write a prototype" — and then spends the next six months trying to sell that prototype internally. Companies come back and say, "I'm sorry, there are eighty other prototypes like this, and there's nobody to evaluate them." How do we even know what to fix?

The second big danger is the volume of subpar code being written. It's not being tested; it's flowing through incorrectly. I was speaking to a friend in Silicon Valley who said: last year we spent fifteen million dollars on tokens, I have no idea why, we've not been able to let go of a single engineer, and they've not gotten better or faster at anything we did — where did the money go? Increasingly, those questions are going to be asked about AI.

Srikanth: That shift is visible — six or nine months ago it was "use AI," now it's about rationing tokens.

Shrinath V: It's a problem with the metric. Now you're placing the onus on the employee and the manager to say whether it was good spend. I can imagine the conversations in companies now, making exceptions — "everyone else has a $150 plan, but this employee needs a $300 plan." The amount of management effort being wasted is phenomenal.

Srikanth: Where do you see India's real opportunity in the AI age?

Shrinath V: We're at very early stages, so we're borrowing patterns from the past — assuming large companies like Infosys will pick up AI and run with it. But AI is fundamentally changing a lot of things.

I've gone hands-on with AI after nearly twenty years of not coding, and I've gotten surprisingly far. It's not just vibe coding — and some of these terms are dangerous, because the moment you say vibe coding people think low-quality work. You can do real software engineering with AI and get pretty far.

My realisation is that while software engineering looks huge, there are still enormous opportunities in plain automation and basic AI. In six to nine months, when the roar around AI dies down, companies will start looking at different processes within industries and optimising parts of them. That's where the real gain is — that's when the customer makes money and you make money. It's not about getting rid of people. It's about getting the boring parts of the work done through automation so people can do something better.

One firm I'm consulting with decoded this brilliantly. Take their payment process: invoices come in, they get printed, someone signs them, they get scanned and put back. A technologist's first reaction is, "Why? You could have put this in SAP or Tally and had the whole thing in a flow." But very often there are reasons companies work that way. With AI you can now look at this digital-to-analog-to-digital loop, break down the processes, and make it smarter without forcing people to change how they work.

Shrinath V: One thing Indians don't give ourselves enough credit for is that we are creatures of chaos. We know how to operate in chaos, and that shows up in our work. We're heading into an era with a lot of chaos, where people will have to come up with ideas on the fly and implement them. That's going to be the larger opportunity for India.

Srikanth: If you could go back twenty years, what's one blind spot you'd warn your younger self about first?

Shrinath V: He was a very different guy. I'd say: be a lot more unafraid. Looking back, I had a lot of constraints I thought were hard constraints — I couldn't do X, Y or Z. Like most people of my generation, I didn't come from a wealthy family; you had to start earning in your first job. It wasn't really family pressure, it was mental. You calibrate and say this is what I need to do before there's a degree of comfort.

Shrinath V: Even now, looking back, the transition from college to work twenty years ago was such a psychological one, and we don't see it. For the first twenty or twenty-one years of my life I was essentially competing with people — there are only so many seats to get into engineering, you need to be in the top few to get a job. Then you get the job and the first thing you're told is that you need to collaborate. So on the ledger I'm collaborating, but mentally I'm still competing, like most people my age, trying to work out how to get ahead. That competition is ingrained and you don't know how to collaborate well. It took me quite a few years to realise I'm not competing with others, and to understand what collaboration actually means. That was my biggest blind spot.

And in India, whenever you're faced with a problem you can't solve, you think it's a personal failure — because that's how our entire examination system is set up. I get a problem, I can't solve it, so something's wrong with me, I need to prepare more, I mustn't have studied hard enough, I must be dumb. Versus looking around and saying, other people are struggling with this too — could we look at it jointly? Maybe I don't need to have all the answers by myself. That's a big shift, and I think it's a larger blind spot we have as a country: we're trying to out-compete.

Srikanth: It's a beautiful call-out, because we forget how much more you can learn just by collaborating with others.

Srikanth: You've spent a career helping people make better bets. What's a big bet you're personally making right now?

Shrinath V: The boring answer is AI — but I'm doing it a little differently. There are a couple of bets. One is health: once you get to your forties you realise you need to take care of it a lot better, so the big bet is to stay healthy as long as possible.

On the career front, I've gone hands-on with coding with AI, because I'm realising a lot of the boundaries I thought were fixed no longer are. As a product manager, product coach and consultant, my boundary was always where I handed over to engineering — and some of the initiatives I worked on failed because engineering wasn't able to deliver. That's not just about them; it's about the dance between teams. So the bigger question for me is how far can I get with AI, and how much of my own work can I use AI to make redundant.

I want to be operationally lazy, not intellectually lazy.

Srikanth: Three signs that someone has a dangerous blind spot they haven't discovered yet.

Shrinath V: 1. Others see situations differently and you're *judging* them for it, rather than working out why they saw it differently — whether that's a different function or a different generation. You feel they can't align with your thinking. 2. You're pattern-matching everything. The whole future seems to be a reflection of the past. 3. You don't see how *you* are changing — you treat your self as invariant through the process. Being able to say "I'm not the same person I was; my situation has changed, my thinking has changed — have my decisions changed?" is important.

Shrinath V: The ones we keep postponing: 1. How is the world outside changing? Very easy to miss. 2. How am I changing in response to the world, and what's coming next? 3. What am I missing?

Shrinath V: 1. That the patterns of the past will hold — that huge companies with two lakh people servicing the old model will carry into a future that's going to look very different from smaller, nimbler companies. 2. That we need to build everything ground-up. There's enough open source technology for us to work on, contribute back to, and make better. 3. Being clearer about where we compete versus where we collaborate — and being smarter about collaboration. There's a much larger world beyond the US and China, and we need to spend more time with the rest of it, working out what we serve.

Shrinath V: The most fascinating thing in all of this is decoding people, and some people do it brilliantly — finding patterns in how people behave. The ones I really admire are folks like Santosh Desai, who does a lot of behavioural research in India. My question would be: with so much diversity in this country, how do you find *universal* patterns?

Srikanth: A beautiful question — we're such a diverse country, how do you even make sense of what's happening around you.

Srikanth: We always end with a listener action. One thing someone can do today?

Shrinath V: We're at a very unusual moment in history thanks to the changes in technology. Take some time, pause, and reflect. Do the same three things: How is the world outside changing? How are you changing in response to it? And more importantly — what are you missing? What's your blind spot? Even if you just start becoming aware that there might be something, ask others, and see if you can uncover it. It's not just for your career; it'll make your life a lot richer.

Srikanth: Despite the pace at which the world is moving, the simple truth for everybody is to pause. Conversations like these remind us that growth doesn't always come from answers — it often comes from better questions.