Few things in life bring out a sense of unbounded curiosity, and for me, two pivotal moments in my professional journey kindled a deep inquisitiveness of exploring the why, what, and how people learn and to design scalable learning systems that propel the human potential forward.
Be it making precision farming accessible to smallholders who never went through formal education or retraining thousands of distributed teams on mission-critical operations at the peak of the pandemic — what made me fall in love with learning sciences is how implementing even the most basic principles not only elevated the user experience but drove exceptional business outcomes.
At Avenca, the startup I co-founded, we helped smallholders adopt cost-effective precision farming techniques to help improve their farm yield using smart sensors and predictive analytics. This was consequential as the ever-increasing water scarcity and inflated fertilizer costs made crop cultivation uneconomical for many across India.
The bigger challenge, though, was designing a digital product for farmers with diverse literacy experiences — some never went through formal education, while others were schoolteachers who did farming as a side hustle.
As for Volteo, new environmental regulations forced shipping companies to restructure their vessel operations, which meant retraining thousands of seafarers, all while the world was grappling with a pandemic.
The tension was palpable — to remain compliant, shore staff added several new procedures but lacked time to design quality learning resources. On the flip side, the crew believed they were already understaffed and overworked, dealing with more critical challenges, namely port congestions and crew change crisis.
This misalignment of expectations led to high attrition at shipping companies, especially when they needed staff the most.
Despite being two distinct contexts, the principles of computer-supported collaborative learning applied albeit differently, saved the day!
At Avenca, I noticed that existing training resources provided complex, technical explanations and focused more on individual mastery, overlooking the fact that most farmers made collective decisions and synchronized their farm activities.
So, I designed a learning app prototype that leveraged dialogic interaction and collaborative knowledge building — users with higher literacy but limited farming experience were paired with those who had decades of farming knowledge but lacked formal education, enabling them to scaffold each other to combine age-old regenerative farming practices with modern technologies.
And our bet paid off as we quickly gained market share, achieving a 98% customer retention rate for our core product.
Coming to Volteo, for our product Wayship to succeed, we had to foster cross-team empathy and make learning new tasks more intuitive.
To address this, I designed a feature, Ahoy Stream, a Twitter-style feed where every time a task was completed, it would auto-post on the team dashboard details of the task performed, names of the crew involved, and the total time spent.
This simple act of creating visibility of actions being performed thousands of miles away helped accomplish intersubjective meaning-making, giving the shore staff a richer context of what seafarers' day looked like, which helped resolve conflicts by a significant measure.
In addition, I collaborated with ship-shore teams to redesign their internal regulatory processes. By moving away from email threads and unmanaged spreadsheets, I focused on leveraging group cognition — instead of shore staff being passive creators of rules, we enabled them to actively participate in the tasks.
Acting as virtual teammates, they helped the seafarers learn to make compliant decisions and raised red flags much sooner, saving hundreds of hours spent on approvals and rectifying record entries.
The implementation was well-received, and today, Wayship is deployed on over 200 vessels transporting the world's cargo in a much greener way, loved by both the seafarers and beluga whales alike!
As advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics gain momentum, workplaces have to continually retrain their employees at unprecedented levels to meet their unique business challenges.
What's more fascinating is how digital tools are making pedagogical approaches that were previously considered uneconomical, be it project-based learning or cognitive apprenticeship, more accessible, and I can only imagine the impact of technologies like augmented reality and wearable brain-machine interfaces to accelerate this phenomenon.
Knowledge today is no longer rate-limited by the physical libraries one has access to — the internet happened, ChatGPT happened, and information has become an omnipresent commodity.
Now imagine a world where learners, be it a K12 student or an office-going adult learner, are no longer limited by the physical attributes of the tools they use or the environments they reside in. Digital tools can allow learners from across geographies to come together and create intricate virtual worlds to explore unique ideas that are no longer bound by what's locally possible.
As I progress in my career, I'm quite excited about the prospects of building products interweaving learning sciences principles with experience design, large language models and product management to foster lifelong, lifewide learning and build unconventional yet impactful solutions for the work paradigms of today and tomorrow.
Anyways, thanks for reading this short, personal note. If you too, have a tale to share, you know me — I'm only one call away!