Musings of a generalist
Tinkerer, Builder, Learner
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01 / About
Tinkerer, Builder, Learner
I do product management and marketing for security products. The work is mostly translation: taking genuinely hard technology and making it something people can understand and choose. The rest of the time I build and fly drones, at a crash rate I have stopped defending.
02 / What I Do
Product Management
Working out what problem a product actually solves, then making the roadmap answer that question.
Security products carry two audiences at once. There is the analyst who will live inside the tool every day and knows exactly where it wastes their time. There is also the executive who signs for it, carries the risk, and may never open it. A roadmap has to hold both without collapsing into either.
Most of the work happens before anything gets built: talking to the people who will use it, separating the loud request from the common one, and deciding what the product will refuse to do. The decisions that matter are usually about scope rather than features.
- Discovery and customer research
- Roadmap and prioritisation
- Requirements and delivery
- Working with engineering and design
03 / What I Do
Product Marketing
Holding one honest message steady while everyone pulls it their own way.
Sales want the line that closes. Product want the thing they built described. Engineering want it accurate to the decimal. All three are reasonable, and all three pull in different directions. My job is to hold the knot near the middle.
The tie breaker is the customer. Everyone gets heard, but only one of them gets a veto: if a claim is not true for the person buying it, it does not ship, however well it sells. That is the whole discipline, and it is harder than it sounds.
- Positioning and messaging
- Launches and narrative
- Competitive and analyst context
- Enablement for sales teams
04 / Flying
Drone (Multirotor) Videography
Cinematic FPV in the canyon
My obsession with flying things I couldn’t control started with a radio controlled Champ and a state of the art setup with an 808 keychain camera duct taped underneath and transmitting to a cheap receiver connected to an even cheaper display. These days it is a 3.5 inch quadcopter with a TBS Crossfire and a DJI O4 Pro.
A quadcopter has no control surfaces at all. Every movement comes from four motors disagreeing with each other in a precise way, which is the blueprint behind this page.
Fly a wireframe quadcopter in the browser. Keyboard, no objectives.
05 / Photography
Bird Photography
Asian Paradise Flycatcher (juvenile)
Sinhagad Valley · 1 of 8
Bird photography is widely believed to be a peaceful pursuit. It is in fact an elaborate contest between a man with eleven kilos of equipment and a creature weighing forty grams, and the creature is winning comfortably.
The routine is unvarying. One rises at an hour that can only be described as uncivil, drives to the Sinhagad valley in the dark, and settles into a patch of wet undergrowth with the air of a man who knows exactly what he is doing. One then waits. The paradise flycatcher, meanwhile, has been up for some time and is conducting its affairs four feet behind one’s left shoulder, where the lens cannot go.
Kruger was meant to be easier, on the reasonable theory that a leopard is harder to overlook than a warbler. This proved optimistic. Mulshi, for its part, offered a Malabar pit viper at eye level and a great deal of unsolicited personal growth.
Twenty seven frames survive from all of this. A gold fronted leafbird made it onto Wikipedia, which I mention at every opportunity and shall continue to mention. The bird, I regret to say, was entirely unmoved.
Always glad to hear from former students, and from anyone who has also lost a drone to a tree.
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