INSIGHTS
Working notes, not thought leadership.
Frameworks I actually use, reflections on projects that went sideways, and the occasional argument with the received wisdom of hardware product development.
Bio-SAP Caught Up. PHA Did Not.
The absorbency gap between bio-based and synthetic superabsorbent polymers has effectively closed, but fully compostable menstrual pads remain blocked by a backsheet material whose largest producer filed for bankruptcy in March 2025.
India's Premium Paradox: Willing to Pay, Refusing to Be Fooled
Indian consumers are spending more on premium goods than at any point in the country's history — and dismantling, at speed, every brand that charges a premium without delivering one.
The $0.043 Floor: What Solar and Storage Costs Actually Make Possible
Solar electricity now costs less than the fuel component of a coal plant, and battery storage has fallen 93% since 2010 — but the new product categories this enables are narrower, harder, and further away than the abundance thesis assumes.
The $60,000 Mould Problem: Why MVP Fails Hardware and What Replaces It
The minimum viable product framework assumes iteration is cheap and reversible; in hardware, where a single production mould costs $60,000–$150,000 and each build cycle runs months, that assumption is a category error — and the teams that survive replace it with staged assumption tests gated by tooling cost.
The 55°C Spec: Why India's Climate Is Rewriting Product Engineering
India's recurring 50°C heat, monsoon humidity, pervasive dust, and grid voltage swings are no longer edge cases to be tolerated — they are baseline specifications that separate products that sell from products that fail.
The Evaluation Layer: Where AI Pays for Itself in Physical Product Development
AI's measurable returns in physical product development come not from generating novel geometry but from evaluating what already exists — inspecting parts, reducing test programmes, and compressing simulation cycles.
The Second Human: Who Design Forgot
Human-centred design defines 'human' as the person who buys the product, not the one who installs it, fixes it, or takes it apart at end-of-life — and the cost falls on 437 dead workers a year in the United States alone.
THE POSITION
A prototype proves the physics. It does not prove the business — and the gap between those two is where most hardware dies.
Every engagement here is built to close that gap: what the product asserts, what would falsify it, what the next proof costs, and when it lands.
