MD & Head of Product, Global Banking @JPMorgan × McKinsey Digital Leader × ThoughtWorks MD | User-centric, data-led AI at scale | #ProductManagement #Payments
New York, USA
Joined May 2007
- Tweets2K
- Following1.7K
- Followers1K
- Likes3.3K
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
One of the best photos of Messi we've seen at this World Cup 🏟️🇦🇷
(📸 Julian Finney)
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
Only one chance in this lifetime…
Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.
I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
The comfortable middle is over for software.
Growth has stalled but true profitability still hasn't arrived — most of the sector is stuck: too slow for a premium growth multiple, too diluted for a fortress multiple.
a16z's David George says CEOs have 12-18 months to pick exactly one of two paths: a16z.news/p/there-are-only-t…
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
Your entire life will change the day you realize real confidence is less about knowing you’ll win and more about knowing you’ll bounce back even if you don’t. Real confidence is resilience. Adaptability. Tolerance for uncertainty. Fear loses when you know failure is never final.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
Underrated life hack: Build a “no matter what” habit. One thing you do every day regardless of mood, chaos, or excuses. Ten minutes of writing. A short walk. A chapter read. These become your anchors. The habit isn’t the point; who you become by keeping it is.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
The only thing that matters in consumer software is velocity of shipping. You will regularly be wrong about what people want: no one is a perfect psychologist. But if you are out at the frontlines with concepts everyday, your team will have their finger on the pulse of users and know where to add fuel.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
I’m starting to get into a habit of reading everything (blogs, articles, book chapters,…) with LLMs. Usually pass 1 is manual, then pass 2 “explain/summarize”, pass 3 Q&A. I usually end up with a better/deeper understanding than if I moved on. Growing to among top use cases.
On the flip side, if you’re a writer trying to explain/communicate something, we may increasingly see less of a mindset of “I’m writing this for another human” and more “I’m writing this for an LLM”. Because once an LLM “gets it”, it can then target, personalize and serve the idea to its user.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
Agency > Intelligence
I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?
Grok explanation is ~close:
“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.
People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.
It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
If this Karpathy interview doesn't pop the ai bubble,
nothing will.
10 brutal quotes:
1. LLMs don’t work yet
They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t use computers, and they don’t remember what you tell them.
They’re cognitively lacking. It’ll take about a decade to work through all of that.
2. When you boot them up, they always start from zero
They have no distillation phase, no process like sleep where what happened gets analyzed and written back into the weights.
3. What’s stored in their weights is only a hazy recollection of the internet
It's just a compressed blur of 15 trillion tokens squeezed into a few billion parameters. Their context window is just short-term working memory.
4. They’re good at imitation, terrible at going off the data manifold
Too much memory, not enough reasoning.
We need to strip away the memorized knowledge and keep the cognitive core: the algorithms, the magic of intelligence, problem-solving, strategy.
5. We’ve probably recreated a cortical tissue, pattern-learning and general, but we’re still missing the rest of the brain
No hippocampus for memory.
No amygdala for instincts.
No emotions or motivations.
6. They memorize perfectly but generalize poorly
If you give them random numbers, they can recite them back. No human can do that.
That’s the problem: humans forget just enough to be forced to find patterns.
7. Anything truly new, code that’s never been written before, ideas that have no template; they stumble
They’re still autocomplete engines with perfect recall and no understanding. Until we find that cognitive core, intelligence stripped of memory but full of reasoning, they’ll stay brilliant mimics, not minds.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
Decide the type of person you want to be.
Prove it to yourself with small wins.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs
“Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.”
For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics.
“We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.”
People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable:
“The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.”
He continues:
“Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.”
They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something.
“We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.”
Video source: @lennysan (2025)
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
Major career cheat code: Build a reputation for reliability. You can get pretty damn far by just being someone who people can count on to show up and do the work. Who stays true to their word. Who can figure it out. The old fashioned things never go out of style.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
A life lesson I wish I learned earlier: Your thoughts shape your reality. Think small, live small. Think big, live big. Upgrade your thoughts. Demand more from yourself. Reality bends to those who believe it can.
Maneesh Subherwal retweeted
An underrated life lesson: Tolerance for uncertainty is the most valuable human trait. The greatest rewards in life go to those who can show up every single day even when the rewards are uncertain. The one who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win.
