What Gardening Taught Me About Product Work

A few years ago, my balcony was empty.

I'd been working in trading systems for years by then — staring at screens, writing requirements, chasing deadlines. The work was good, but the days blurred into each other. I needed something that wasn't a Jira ticket. Something that didn't talk back. I bought a few small plants on a weekend whim.

That was it. That was the start.

It got out of hand quickly

One plant became five. Five became twenty. I started reading about soil. Then about light. Then about how certain trees fruit only if you prune them at the right time of year. Before I knew it, my home in Noida had turned into a small jungle — flowering trees, fruit trees, vines climbing the walls.

The Better India ended up writing about it. A few local YouTubers came over to film tours. None of that was the plan. The plan was just to have something green to look at after a long day.

But here's the thing I didn't expect: the more I gardened, the better I got at my actual work. And I don't mean that in a fluffy, "nature heals you" kind of way. I mean it changed how I think about building things.

You can't rush a tomato

In software, we like fast. Ship the feature. Hit the deadline. Move on.

A plant doesn't care about your deadline. A mango tree takes years before it gives you mangoes. You water it, you wait. You water it, you wait. You can't yell at it to grow faster. You can't escalate it to a manager.

What you can do is set it up well. Good soil. Right amount of sun. Protect it from pests. And then trust the process.

That's product work too. The features that actually matter — the ones that change how people behave — take time to land. You set up the conditions. You give it room. You stop poking at it every five minutes to see if it's working yet.

I used to be impatient with rollouts. I'd want to see numbers move in week one. Now I think more in seasons.

You learn by looking, not by reading

I've read a lot of gardening books. They're useful. But every single time I've actually figured something out, it's been from looking at a plant.

A leaf curls a certain way. The colour shifts. Something's eating the underside of the new growth. The book can tell you what might be wrong. The plant tells you what is wrong.

The same thing is true in product. You can read every framework, every Lenny newsletter, every teardown — but until you go talk to actual users and watch them struggle with your thing, you're just guessing.

Gardening made me a better observer. I notice details I would have walked past a year ago. That habit carries over.

Some things just die. That's okay.

Not every plant I've brought home has survived. Some I overwatered. Some were in the wrong spot. Some just didn't take, for reasons I never figured out.

In my first year of gardening, every loss felt personal. I'd inspect the dead leaves and try to assign blame to myself. Now I just compost the plant and try again with something else.

Products are the same. Some features I've worked on landed beautifully. Some quietly died. Some launched, lived for a few months, and then got cut. Early in my career, every dead project felt like a referendum on me. Now I take notes and move on.

Letting things go is a skill. Gardening teaches you faster than work does.

The pivot makes more sense than it looks

People sometimes ask me — a Business Analyst from capital markets — why I'm moving into AI Product Management.

The honest answer is that I've always liked watching things grow. Systems, teams, ideas, products. A garden is just a slower version of what I do at work: figure out what something needs, give it that, observe, adjust, repeat.

AI products especially. They're new. Half of what we know about how to build them will be wrong in two years. You can't just follow a recipe — you have to watch how they behave, the same way you watch a plant. What's working? What's stressed? What needs more light?

That's the work I want to be doing. And I think a decade of patience with tomatoes has prepared me for it more than I realised.

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If you're curious about the garden itself, the Better India article has photos. Or reach out — I love talking about plants almost as much as I love talking about products.