The cleanest way I know to describe the difference between 0-to-1 and 1-to-10 product work:
In 0-to-1, you're arguing for the existence of a thing. You're trying to answer: should this exist? Is there a user problem here that's worth solving? Is there a business model that can sustain it?
In 1-to-10, those questions are answered. Now you're asking: given that this exists and works, how do you make it work ten times more? For ten times more people? With ten times the reliability?
Both are hard. They require different muscles. I've had the chance to do both at scale.
MakeMyTrip: 1-to-10 at Indian scale
I joined MakeMyTrip in 2020 to lead international hotels. The product existed. It worked. Room nights were in the thousands per day. But we were competing against Booking.com — a company with a decade's head start, global inventory, and data advantages we couldn't match.
The 1-to-10 challenge here wasn't about the product form. It was about the user. Indian travelers abroad are a specific population with specific needs, anxieties, and expectations that global platforms weren't designed to address.
I've told this story in some detail in another section of this site, so I'll be brief here: we went from 2,200 to 14,000 room nights per day. NPS moved from 22 to 45. I was named Employee of the Year.
The thing I want to add here is what it felt like to drive a 7× improvement in an established product at a public company. The constraints are real and visible. You can't rewrite the whole product. You can't rebuild the inventory model. You work within the system, finding the leverage points that the organization can actually act on. The skill is as much political as it is technical — getting alignment, building coalitions, making the case for investments in user trust that don't show up immediately in revenue.
InMobi/Glance: 0-to-1 at phone lock screen scale
In 2022, I joined InMobi's Glance product — a content platform that lives on Android lock screens. The lock screen is one of the most-seen surfaces in any smartphone user's day. It's also one of the least understood from a product perspective.
Glance Live was a new bet: live content on the lock screen. Not just static posts or images — live events, matches, election results, breaking news, interactive moments. All surfaced before you even unlock your phone.
I was brought in to build it.
Zero users. Zero content partnerships. Zero playbook. That's 0-to-1.
We started by asking: what makes someone actually engage with the lock screen, rather than dismissing it as noise? The answer, empirically, turned out to be: events. When something is happening, people want information before they've formulated the intent to look for it. Live scores. Live updates. Live moments.
The product I built was an event-triggered content surface. When the India-Pakistan cricket match is on, the lock screen becomes a scoreboard. When election results are coming in, it becomes a results tracker. The lock screen earns the right to the user's attention by being useful in the moment when the attention exists naturally.
We scaled from zero to 10 million monthly active users. Revenue grew to $10M ARR. I was fast-tracked to Director. Glance gave me what they call the Bond 007 award — their top 1% recognition.
What the two experiences taught me
The 0-to-1 experience taught me that the most important question in early product work is: what would have to be true for someone to change their behavior? Not "is this feature useful?" — useful things sit unused all the time. Behavior change is the unit of value.
The 1-to-10 experience taught me that at scale, the product manager's leverage is mostly in alignment and framing. At scale, the engineering and design resources exist. The bottleneck is clarity about what to do and organizational will to do it.
Together, they've given me something I try to bring to every new context: the ability to ask, clearly and early, which kind of problem is this? Because the tools for 0-to-1 and 1-to-10 are genuinely different. Using the wrong ones wastes time and erodes credibility.
Knowing which game you're playing is most of the work.