VT-GSK 🇮🇳

Developer turned Product Manager. Used to push code, now I just push deadlines. Av-geek.

[AviationAll @AviationAll_]

It's Been Over 5 Years Since Air India was Bought by the Tata Group. Unfortunately due to Supply Chain Issues, the Hard-Product Changes have only begun to Reflect 🇮🇳

We'll be Taking a Close Look at Air India's Network Offering a Premium Hard Product.

An AviationAll THREAD🧵👇

[Abhishek Singh @0xlelouch_]

No bullshit system design guide for backend engineers who want to reach Staff level.

Devs stay stuck at ₹10 to 25 LPA cause they know frameworks, but not systems.

Meanwhile Staff Engineers are often paid:

India: ₹40L to ₹1Cr+
Remote: $120k to $250k+

So if you cannot explain these clearly, you are not ready for senior backend roles, let alone Staff.

1. Load Balancing
2. SQL vs NoSQL
3. Idempotency
4. Message Queues
5. CAP Theorem
6. APIs
7. Batch vs Stream Processing
8. Caching Strategies
9. Webhooks
10. Availability
11. Data Sharding and Partitioning
12. Bloom Filters
13. Stateful vs Stateless Architecture
14. Algorithms in Distributed Systems
15. API Gateways
16. Proxy vs Reverse Proxy
17. Sharding
18. Long Polling vs WebSockets
19. Consistent Hashing
20. gRPC, tRPC, GraphQL, or REST
21. Caching
22. Scaling
23. Cache Eviction Policies
24. Databases in System Design
25. JWTs
26. Services in System Design
27. Concurrency vs Parallelism
28. CDC
29. ACID Transactions
30. CDN
31. Sync vs Async
32. Rate Limiting Algorithms
33. REST
34. gRPC vs REST tradeoffs
35. Fault Tolerance

Truth is, Staff level is not about writing more code.

It is about knowing where systems break, why they break, and how to design so they keep making money even when traffic, failures, and complexity go up.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

If you’re a PM and not using Claude like this, you’re already behind.

I broke down how top product managers at Google, Meta, and Anthropic actually integrate it into roadmap planning, PRDs, and stakeholder alignment.

It’s not about writing better docs.

It’s about thinking better decisions.

Here are 10 prompts they use daily:

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left.

I woke up this morning to dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues. It pushed me to finally speak up.

I never spoke publicly about the company after I left. Part of that was loyalty to John Donahoe, who gave me an unlikely opportunity, handing the reins of PayPal to a startup guy who, on paper, had no business running a then 15,000-person organization. But part of it was something else: I had left. I chose not to stay and fight for the changes I believed in. Speaking from the sidelines felt like armchair commentary. Easy opinions without the burden of execution. So I stayed quiet.

But twelve years of silence is long enough. And today's news makes it clear the pattern I've watched unfold isn't self-correcting.

I left PayPal in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated. We had executed a silent turnaround of a company that had lost its soul. We brought back engineering talent, shipped good products quickly, and acquired Braintree and Venmo. The company was on a tear. So much so that Carl Icahn felt compelled to accumulate a position in eBay and push for a PayPal spinoff. At the time, eBay decided to fight Icahn.

It was a difficult period for me, caught between what I felt was right for PayPal and my loyalty to the eBay team.

This is when Mark Zuckerberg approached me to join Facebook. The combination of his conviction that messaging would become foundational, the appeal of going back to building products at scale, and my growing exhaustion with the internal politics at PayPal and eBay eventually convinced me to leave and join one of the best teams in the world, one I had admired for a long time.

In the summer of 2014, I met John in a café in Portola Valley and told him I had decided to leave. During that conversation, he told me that Icahn had effectively won the fight, that PayPal was going to become an independent company, and he tried to convince me to stay on as CEO, but I had already said yes to Mark, and my word is my bond. There was no turning back.

After my departure, the board scrambled to find a replacement, and it took a few months for them to land on Dan Schulman. The leadership style shifted from product-led to financially-led. Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization.

Much of the momentum we had created still persisted and carried the company forward, mainly driven by Bill Ready, who came over in the Braintree acquisition and rose to COO. Under his leadership, Venmo grew exponentially, and total payment volume (TPV) accelerated quickly. But the shift under Schulman became more pronounced after Bill's departure at the end of 2019. With him went the product conviction that had defined the post-spinoff momentum. Then, for a period, COVID-fueled online shopping hid a lot of the company's new weaknesses.

During that period, the company made a fundamental miscalculation: it optimized for payment volume instead of margin and differentiation. It leaned into unbranded checkout, where PayPal had the least leverage, instead of branded checkout, where the margin, data, and customer relationship actually lived.

Visa masterfully structured a deal that effectively ended PayPal's ability to steer customers toward bank-funded transactions, which had been a core driver of PayPal's economics. Not long after, PayPal lost a significant portion of eBay's volume. Over time, it saw its share of checkout among its most profitable customers steadily erode as Apple Pay and others continued to execute well.

The same pattern repeated itself across lending, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and new rails.

On lending, PayPal missed the opportunity to turn it into a platform weapon. Products like Working Capital were conservative, short-duration, and optimized for loss minimization. Lending never became programmable, never became identity-driven, and never became a reason for merchants or consumers to choose PayPal over something else.

The missed opportunity in BNPL was even more striking. Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay didn't just offer installment payments, they built consumer finance brands, persistent credit identities, and new shopping behaviors. PayPal saw the BNPL turn, entered the market, and had every advantage: distribution, trust, and merchant relationships. But BNPL was treated as a defensive checkout feature rather than an offensive category. There was no attempt to turn it into a core consumer relationship, no super-app behavior, and no meaningful differentiation for merchants. Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature.

The failure to lean into building and owning new rails followed the same logic. After the spinoff, PayPal had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a global, at scale payment network. Instead, the company focused on building on top of existing networks and third-party rails.

More recently, that mindset carried over to PYUSD. Technically, the product was sound. Strategically, it launched without a compelling transactional reason to exist. PYUSD had distribution, but no organic demand. It was not embedded deeply enough into flows to become a true settlement layer, a cross-border merchant rail, or a programmable money primitive. It sat adjacent to the product instead of inside the core of it.

Acquisitions during this period followed a similar pattern. Honey was not a strategic acquisition for PayPal. It added activity, but not leverage. It lived outside the transaction, monetized affiliate economics rather than payment economics, and never meaningfully strengthened PayPal's control of the customer or the checkout moment. Xoom solved a real problem in remittances, but it never compounded PayPal's advantage. It scaled volume without changing the underlying rails, identity graph, or settlement model, and as importantly, it didn’t cater to a high-value, high-margin customer archetype.

None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions.

The board eventually recognized the problem. In 2023, they brought in Alex Chriss, an Intuit veteran with a strong product background, explicitly to restore product conviction. It was the right instinct.

But Alex came from software, not payments. He understood SMB product development. He didn't have the muscle memory for transaction economics, network effects, or settlement infrastructure.

In hindsight, he also made an error: clearing out much of the leadership team that understood payments deeply. Executives with years of institutional knowledge departed within his first year.

This morning, Alex was removed as CEO. Branded checkout grew 1% last quarter. The board tapped another operator, Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO who's been on the PayPal board for five years.

I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company.

The common thread through all of this is incentive design. Once PayPal became independent, short/medium-term predictability beat long-term vision and ambition. Stock performance mattered more than platform risk and network opportunity. Financial optimization replaced product conviction.

I'm not claiming I would have made every call differently. Running a public company at scale involves tradeoffs I didn't have to make after I left. But the pattern, choosing predictability over platform risk, again and again, was a choice, not an inevitability.

Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes.

That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about.

[Avi Chawla @_avichawla]

Researchers built a new RAG approach that:

- does not need a vector DB.
- does not embed data.
- involves no chunking.
- performs no similarity search.

And it hit 98.7% accuracy on a financial benchmark (SOTA).

Here's the core problem with RAG that this new approach solves:

Traditional RAG chunks documents, embeds them into vectors, and retrieves based on semantic similarity.

But similarity ≠ relevance.

When you ask "What were the debt trends in 2023?", a vector search returns chunks that look similar.

But the actual answer might be buried in some Appendix, referenced on some page, in a section that shares zero semantic overlap with your query.

Traditional RAG would likely never find it.

PageIndex (open-source) solves this.

Instead of chunking and embedding, PageIndex builds a hierarchical tree structure from your documents, like an intelligent table of contents.

Then it uses reasoning to traverse that tree.

For instance, the model doesn't ask: "What text looks similar to this query?"

Instead, it asks: "Based on this document's structure, where would a human expert look for this answer?"

That's a fundamentally different approach with:

- No arbitrary chunking that breaks context.
- No vector DB infrastructure to maintain.
- Traceable retrieval to see exactly why it chose a specific section.
- The ability to see in-document references ("see Table 5.3") the way a human would.

But here's the deeper issue that it solves.

Vector search treats every query as independent.

But documents have structure and logic, like sections that reference other sections and context that builds across pages.

PageIndex respects that structure instead of flattening it into embeddings.

Do note that this approach may not make sense in every use case since traditional vector search is still fast, simple, and works well for many applications.

But for professional documents that require domain expertise and multi-step reasoning, this tree-based, reasoning-first approach shines.

For instance, PageIndex achieved 98.7% accuracy on FinanceBench, significantly outperforming traditional vector-based RAG systems on complex financial document analysis.

Everything is fully open-source, so you can see the full implementation in GitHub and try it yourself.

I have shared the GitHub repo in the replies!

[TBPN @tbpn]

Sequoia partner @sonyatweetybird says we're going from the age of product-led growth to the age of agent-led growth.

"You see this most clearly if you're using Claude Code actively. It says, 'Hey, for a database, you should use Supabase. For hosting, use Vercel.' It's choosing for you, the stuff you should be using."

"Product-led growth brought us closer to the vision of 'best product wins,' but ultimately people are still lazy. They can't read all the reviews, and they kind of default to what looks cool on the website."

"Whereas your agent has infinite time to go and make these choices for you. It can go and read all the documentation, read all the user comments, and figure out [what you need] for your use case."

[VT-GSK 🇮🇳 @gampala_k]

Onwards and upwards 🚀 @narsagna

[Nars @narsagna]

It's free to try btw, you might literally find your hires with one search

[IT Unprofessional @it_unprofession]

Just got off a call with a vendor trying to sell us a new security platform.

The sales guy spent 45 minutes explaining how their product uses "next-generation behavioral analytics" and "zero-trust architecture."

I let him finish his pitch. Then I said, "This is impressive, but we'd need to see how it integrates with our existing SIEM infrastructure and whether it's compatible with our compliance framework."

He looked uncertain. I said, "Why don't you put together a technical spec document and we can evaluate it against our current vendor."

We don't have a current vendor for this. We don't need this product at all.

But now he's going to spend two weeks creating a detailed proposal that I'll never read.

And when he follows up, I'll say we've decided to "postpone the evaluation until Q3 due to other strategic priorities."

Why waste his time like this? Because in six months, when I actually do need something from his company, he'll remember that I gave his product "serious consideration."

That's leverage. When I'm ready to buy something, he'll give me a better price because he's been trying to win my business for half a year.

Vendor management is about training them to compete for your attention, not the other way around.

[VT-GSK 🇮🇳 @gampala_k]

@Ananth_IRAS Sir that’s chitrangi guest house correct?

[VT-GSK 🇮🇳 @gampala_k]

@BalaganiBalaji Congrats bro!

[VT-GSK 🇮🇳 @gampala_k]

@MissWanyeri @isamudralap

[Tech with Mak @techNmak]

Every software developer should know the difference.

Concurrency and Parallelism are not the same.

Follow the 🧵

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

Junior PM: My feature got deprioritized again. Engineering says they don't have bandwidth.

Senior PM: What did you do next?

Junior PM: Told my manager. It's not my fault engineering is understaffed.

Senior PM: Is that where it ended?

Junior PM: What else can I do? I don't control hiring.

Senior PM: You don't control hiring. What do you control?

Junior PM: …my roadmap?

Senior PM: Keep going.

Junior PM: My relationships with engineers?

Senior PM: Getting warmer.

Junior PM: I could understand why they're overwhelmed?

Senior PM: Now you're thinking. What would you find?

Junior PM: They're drowning in bugs from the last release.

Senior PM: And?

Junior PM: If we fixed those bugs, they'd have bandwidth.

Senior PM: But that's not your job, right?

Junior PM: It's not in my OKRs...

Senior PM: There it is. The cage you built.

Junior PM: What cage?

Senior PM: "Not my job." "Not my fault." "Can't control that."

Junior PM: But those are facts.

Senior PM: They're excuses dressed as facts.

Junior PM: How?

Senior PM: Watch this. What if you owned those bugs?

Junior PM: But I didn't create them.

Senior PM: So?

Junior PM: …I could organize a bug bash?

Senior PM: What else?

Junior PM: Prioritize which bugs actually matter to users?

Senior PM: More.

Junior PM: Write reproduction steps so engineers save time?

Senior PM: Notice what just happened?

Junior PM: I found things I could do.

Senior PM: You went from victim to owner.

Junior PM: But this is extra work.

Senior PM: Is getting your feature built extra?

Junior PM: …no.

Senior PM: Here's what separates good PMs from great ones.

Junior PM: Tell me.

Senior PM: Good PMs manage their features.

Junior PM: And great PMs?

Senior PM: Great PMs manage outcomes. However they can.

Junior PM: Even if it means doing "engineering work"?

Senior PM: There is no "engineering work." There's only "what needs doing."

Junior PM: My manager might not like me spending time on bugs.

Senior PM: Will they like you shipping nothing?

Junior PM: Point taken.

Senior PM: But here's the real mindshift.

Junior PM: What?

Senior PM: Stop asking "whose job is this?"

Junior PM: Ask what instead?

Senior PM: "What would I do if I was CEO?"

Junior PM: CEO's delegate.

Senior PM: No. CEOs ensure things get done.

Junior PM: There's a difference?

Senior PM: Delegation is a method. Ownership is a mindset.

Junior PM: So high agency means doing everyone's job?

Senior PM: High agency means refusing to be blocked.

Junior PM: How do I know if I'm high agency?

Senior PM: Simple test.

Junior PM: Go on.

Senior PM: Count how often you say "they" vs "I" when explaining why something isn't done.

Junior PM: Ouch.

Senior PM: If "they" outnumber "I" - you're making excuses.

Junior PM: But some things really are out of my control.

Senior PM: Name one.

Junior PM: Budget cuts.

Senior PM: What would you do if your kid needed medicine during budget cuts?

Junior PM: I'd find a way...

Senior PM: Exactly.

Junior PM: So it's about caring enough?

Senior PM: It's about owning the outcome. Not the circumstances.

Junior PM: This is exhausting though.

Senior PM: Know what's more exhausting?

Junior PM: What?

Senior PM: Spending your career waiting for perfect conditions.

[VT-GSK 🇮🇳 @gampala_k]

@BagrechaPranay In :)

[Nauseam (in sf!) @ChadNauseam]

"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."

Not true.

A calculator should show you the result of the mathematical expression you entered. That's much, much harder than it sounds.

What I'm about to tell you is the greatest calculator app development story ever told.

[Andreas Klinger 🦾 @andreasklinger]

Patrick asks a great question:
Why is Europe's productivity behind the US?

Everyone says Europe is stuck in decline
But is that the full story?
What's really going on?

I sat down with @yoramdw of @dealroomco to understand the newest data

Here the ultimate Eurodata breakdown⤵️

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

Engineers-turned-PMs keep making the same fatal mistake in stakeholder meetings:

They think logic will save them.

After mentoring a few folks, I've noticed a pattern no one talks about:

[Nikunj Kothari @nikunj]

Product leaders - some free advice that’ll make your exec team happy in the upcoming year:

1) Buy your team subscriptions to @chatprd @Replit & @v0
2) Force your team to use it for 30 mins/day
3) Don’t accept PRDs without prototypes
4) Burn your hiring plan

You’re welcome 🙏

[Aadit Sheth @aaditsh]

One of the best list of tools I've seen in a while.

a16z Apps Unwrapped.

Which ones are your favorites?

PS. Bookmark this to come back to it later.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Much respect for Satya, but this doesn't check out for me as a generic statement.

Workday is a SaaS app that has tons of business logic, workflows, reporting and regulatory compliance.

It will not be replaced by an AI agent or LLM...

But I do see one point (cont'd)