What is Design Your Thinking?

Design Your Thinking is a platform and collection of actionable resources for product makers run by me, Karthik, to teach and share proven and successful ideas, strategies, skills and thinking hacks so you can make products people love.

Why the name Design Your Thinking?

Designing great products starts from within the mind of the maker. It’s the thinking inside the maker(s) minds that give products a shape and form. Design Your Thinking is a belief that anyone can make great products by thinking the right way. The latter is what we explore with the Product Mindset. [Related Read Philosophical history behind Thinking and Design]

If you geek out on English 🙂

The word design in the phrase Design Your Thinking is a verb: you can design your thinking

Who is Karthik?

I was born in India, raised in a middle-class family and did things that middle-class kids do – went to engineering school, worked for a few multinational companies. I am a typical guy-next-door who loves to spend a lot of time with family. I’m a Leo, and guess that speaks volumes of who I am!

What’s my Story?

I was very creative as a kid. I loved pencil-sketching, arts & crafts, theatre, sports and a lot more. In the final year of engineering (in electronics & communication), I ended up starting my first software product startup while doing an internship. I thought the product was a reasonably good one because multiple customers were interested, only until I hit the nightmare of having to customize it for every customer! Oh No!! 😯

To learn the way enterprise software was made, I joined the software development division of a multinational telecom company. I did learn software, but I realized my love was not for software, but for products. That led me to changing jobs, and in my next gig, I ended up building many solutions for different kinds of customers. I discovered my love for solving problems but realized I was more in the solution space than the problem space. I then moved on to a job where I got to spend more time in the problem space.

This journey has brought me a full circle and I’ve had tons of learnings. That’s when I decided to stop, smell the roses, start sharing my learnings with creating products. So here I am!

I Love Taking Action!

The more I tried something, the better I started to get at it. This realization hit me in my early 20s…

Since then, I’ve lived my life as a set of mini experiments – some have worked and some haven’t. Most of my experiments have been to overcome my fears – blogging to overcome the fear of writing, public speaking to overcome my innate introvert character and getting married to overcome the fear of living my life by someone else’s rules, to mention a few! It’s only when I did face my fears that I realized most of these fears were in the mind. Reality is quiet the opposite  – I love public speaking, writing and I now live with a beautiful wife, Vijetha 🙂 and a naughty 3 year-old son, Vivaan  😀

A Word About Side-Projects

No matter what I do, I’ve always had a side-project. In fact, Design Your Thinking started as a side-project too! Love to know what your side-project is – hit me up on Twitter @kartvee or drop me an email.

Make

If you are a maker that’s looking to teach, share and learn from others product makers, you belong here.

Learn

If you love to learn new skills, techniques, thinking hacks and more to make better products, you belong here.

Change

If you are looking to make a change, create products or experiences, you belong here.

Ask Me Anything

I hope you find the content helpful and more importantly, actionable. If you have any question, a comment or a feedback, please don’t hesitate dropping me a note. You can hit the reply button to any of my emails, and I respond to them personally. If you’ve not subscribed to my newsletter (which I’d love to see you on), reach me at karthik at designyourthinking dot com.

My Email Habit

I respond to emails every night when I have a few minutes blocked just to do that. But that doesn’t stop me from responding at other times. You’ll be surprised to get my response almost immediately at times 😕 . I sometimes respond to emails after my morning Karate practice, when I wait for Vijetha to finish grocery shopping  or when sometimes Vivaan wants to sleep holding my hands (and I’m starry eyed) 🙄 . If you do get an immediate response, you’ve caught me doing one of these 😆 . Don’t worry, it’s me and not a robot ( 💡 Did you want to create a bot to help me do that? Nah! I just love doing it!)