The story
Ruhaan Kumar is a student in Singapore and the co-founder of Knot, an app that helps neighbors meet through activities they organize themselves, like a basketball game downstairs. He and a school friend built it in their spare hours and launched it on the Apple App Store.
“What’s more important is shipping out a product instead of shipping out a perfect product.”
The skill at work: Keen Observation (Skill 2)
Keen Observation is the skill of stepping back from the action to see what is really going on. Ruhaan’s story shows how much a leader can learn just by noticing, and by asking others what they notice.
He noticed what was missing
“I live in a 40-story building, yet I don’t know a single person,” Ruhaan says. The playground downstairs is often empty. Singapore once had a kampong spirit, where children played together every day and everyone knew their neighbors.
He noticed what worked elsewhere
At his grandparents’ home in India, almost everyone in the complex knows each other. When someone is sick, neighbors bring food. Ruhaan used that picture as his model for the community he wants to help build.
He asked for honest eyes
While building the app, he kept asking his parents and school friends what they thought. He wanted unbiased opinions, not praise: a feature that was not important, colors that were not nice, a logo that was too small. “Every tiny thing counts.”
He watched how people actually used it
The team built in-app payments. In testing, they saw that asking users to open a payment account made the app harder to use. So they removed the feature and let people pay in person.
He stepped back to see the priority
As the months went on, they cut features they could not afford or that no longer made sense. Ruhaan saw the bigger picture: get a working product out first.
Try this
Take ten minutes this week to notice your own “empty playground”: a place in your team or community where people should be connecting but are not. Ask two people what they see there before you decide what to do.
Another story of this skill
Reading the signals: Alvaro Montoya’s story of Keen Observation →
This article is our interpretation of Ruhaan’s story, based on the conversation on The Adaptive Edge Podcast. The framework names are ours; the events and lessons are his own.