Tabrez Syed

Building products

I’m relearning the craft of building products, nearly thirty years after I started.

I trained as a software engineer and have been shipping products since 1998. I love the work, and for most of that time the work meant people: hiring them, organizing them, and getting them to agree on one thing to build.

At Spiceworks I was the first employee and wrote the early code myself. Eleven years later the company was 400 people and I was head of product, building less and talking more. After that I started smaller companies of my own in real estate, personal finance, and data, and found I liked small teams better.

AI makes the team smaller still. Much of what took a department I can now do in a workshop with a team of agents, so I’m building again. It is a different skill from the one I spent my career on, and I’m learning it now.

I call the workshop an atelier.

Writing

I write to work out what I think, and lately I’ve started doing it in public.

I’ve kept a blog in some form for years, mostly for myself. What I like about writing is taking a set of facts, putting them together, and seeing how they compare with other trends and with history.

The best way to learn is to try. So I’ve written a weekly essay on AI for the past few years, and some of those essays have also run in Towards AI, The AI Journal, Design Bootcamp, Artificial Intelligence in Plain English, and Open Data Science. For more than a year I also wrote my daughter a letter each morning before she left for school. Now I’m writing a book, Wobbling Well, about the meditation I’ve practiced for twenty-five years.

Most of it doubles as practice for working with AI. Doing the same kind of work over and over while the technology underneath keeps changing gives me a feel for the craft.

Why it’s called Mandalivia

When I was eight, I imagined an island that rose out of the Indian Ocean, unclaimed by any nation and unknown to every map. I named it Mandalivia. Its economy ran on chocolate coins, and its parliament spent its time arguing for longer recess. The island stayed in my head until the internet gave it somewhere to live. This site is where it lives now: a place to keep the work and think out loud.