Tag: defaults

Product management and Bengaluru Cafe

My favourite restaurant within “normal walking distance” (i.e. a quick dash – not a long walk that I’m fully capable of) of my house is Bengaluru Cafe in Jayanagar 2nd Block. The masaldose there is very very good, right up there with that at CTR (and far less crowded; Vidyarthi Bhavan dose is a different genus).

It’s crisp outside and soft inside, and what I really like about the dose there is the red chutney that they put inside. Spicy and garlicky, and a nice throwback to masaldose in Bangalore in the 1990s (Adigas, for whatever reason, replaced this red chutney with Chutney  puDi, which is far inferior, and now a lot of the new places put Tamil style chutney puDi which is massively overwhelming).

I had discovered the place in mid 2019, while driving back after closing a long client assignment. The dose was absolutely fantastic. We started going there regularly – rather, bringing the dose parcelled from there (since it’s close enough and crowded). It was with this dose that I had my first “unpaternal instinct” – I had got 3 doses (one for each of us), and kept hoping the daughter wouldn’t finish hers so that I could get some of it. As it happened, the then sub-3-year-old fully polished it off.

And  then something changed – I came home to find that there was no red chutney in the dose (which made it significantly suboptimal). And it happened once again. The next time I went I asked about it, and was told that if I want it I need to ask for it.

It is basically the minority rule in action. A large part of the clientele of the Bengaluru Cafe don’t eat garlic, so don’t want the red chutney. Initially the default was to have the chutney, but the number of requests meant the defaults flipped! And that entirely changed the product.

There was a further caveat – if I wanted red chutney in my dose on Sunday I was entirely out of luck. The crowd on Sunday meant that they would not offer any customisations (red chutney became a “customisation”) so that they could mass produce. So I entirely stopped going there on Sundays.

I went there yesterday morning to buy breakfast. It wasn’t crowded so I could stand near the counter watching them make the dose. In the full griddle of 15 doses, only 2 had the red chutney smeared on – the two that I had ordered. Just one small change in the defaults meant that the produce has changed so much!

Bengaluru Cafe was recently featured on a YouTube food channel that we happeened to watch.

If you watch the video till ~3:25 you will find an interesting thing the host says “the difference with their masaldose is that they don’t spread chutney inside it at all!”

Which means the default has changed so much that people don’t even know what used to be the old product!

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a bit stressful – the reason we all love the dose there is because of the red chutney inside. So I know that if I end up bringing dose without the chutney the family will be disappointed. So I need to make sure I stand at the counter to ensure they put the chutney on our doses.

Default Acronym Expansions

Based on the kind of stuff we are interested in, each of us has our own “default expansions” for acronyms.

Now, there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet (and some are much more common than others), and a good acronym is 2-4 letters long, so there are so many acronyms going around. So it is inevitable that there is acronym overloading, with the same acronym meaning different things in different contexts.

In this context, whenever we see an acronym, we have a default expansion of it based on our interests and domains and exposures. And this can lead to some hilarious interpretations at times.

I read this newsletter called “Margins“. I don’t agree with everything they write, but they write about interesting stuff so I read them. Yesterday’s edition had this gem:

Clearly, the 2008 Financial Crisis and the blowup of CDOs and MBSs left a bad taste in people’s mouths over the chopping up and passing off of debt (note: I now get uncomfortable every time I write “MBS” and “chopped up” in a sentence).

This joke works only because of acronym overloading. MBS also refers to Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and he “allegedly” got dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who worked for the Washington Post, literally chopped up (for those of you for whom Mohammed Bin Salman is the default MBS, it can also refer to Mortgage Backed Securities).

Long ago, I worked for a company that had launched a product acronymised as “LFM”. I could never understand what this product does because my “default expansion” of LFM is Left Arm Fast Medium.

Acronym confusion can also happen when you’re deeply familiar with one domain with its own set of jargons and acronyms, and then are suddenly exposed to another domain that has its own set of jargons and acronyms. It takes a long time to “unlearn” your old acronyms and then learn the new ones.

Then again, given the limited number of acronyms available, sooner or later we better learn to learn and unlearn new meanings of acronyms.

Maybe one day Kohlberg Kravis Roberts will buy Kolkata Knight Riders
I still don’t understand how the IPL allowed Delhi Capitals since there used to exist a team called Deccan Chargers in the same league
Does your All India Rank get announced on All India Radio?

Giant Squid is Good Stuff.