I grew up in Rajkot with a very specific mental model of how things work. How a city functions, what a meal tastes like, what morning sounds like, what a business transaction looks like. This model was built from Rajkot, and it was accurate — for Rajkot.
The first time I traveled somewhere that didn't share the model, it was disorienting in a way I couldn't immediately explain. Things kept not working the way they were supposed to. Not in a bad way — just in a different way. The city had its own logic.
This is the thing I've come to love most about travel: it shows you the places where your mental model ends.
The product connection
I think about travel the same way I think about user research. In both cases, you're encountering a system that wasn't designed for your assumptions. In both cases, the disorientation is the signal — it's pointing to the place where your model is wrong or incomplete.
The mistake most travelers make (and most PMs make in user research) is to explain away the disorientation. The place is inefficient. The users don't understand the product. The data is noisy. All of these are ways of protecting your mental model from the evidence that challenges it.
The better response is to be curious about the disorientation. Why do taxis in this city work differently from the ones I know? What's the underlying logic? Who does this system serve, and how?
I've found that asking these questions in unfamiliar places sharpens the same habit I need in product work: treating "this is strange" as a question rather than a conclusion.
The DAAD year
I spent time in Germany on a DAAD scholarship during my university years. It was my most extended experience of being genuinely out of context — not just in a different city but in a different language, with a different set of social norms, in a place where my usual ways of moving through the world didn't quite fit.
I made more mistakes in Germany than I have anywhere else. I misread social cues, misunderstood how systems worked, showed up to things with the wrong expectations. Most of these mistakes were small. A few were embarrassing.
What I got from the experience was something I couldn't have gotten from a book: the embodied knowledge of what it feels like to not understand the context you're in. This is the knowledge I try to draw on when I think about users who are encountering a product in a context I haven't lived.
I don't know what it feels like to be a 55-year-old first-time smartphone user in rural Maharashtra. But I know what it feels like to be lost in a system — to have the system working correctly while you, specifically, can't navigate it. That's something.
On belonging to more than one place
I've lived in Rajkot, Pilani, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru. I've worked with people from dozens of countries. At some point, you stop having a single reference point for "normal" and start carrying multiple models simultaneously.
This is useful and sometimes disorienting. When you hold multiple models of how something can work, you're less likely to mistake your model for the only possible one. You're more likely to ask: which model is this person or this product or this organization operating from? And is that model serving them well?
The travel didn't teach me to be a relativist — I have strong views about how things should work. But it taught me to distinguish between views I hold because I've thought them through, and views I hold because they're what I grew up with.
That distinction is, I think, the beginning of most useful thinking.