Welcome to this week’s edition of The DesAI Digest. It’s #30, thanks for sticking with me!
We’ll cover:
🛠️ Career Strategy = Competence Triggers: The Subtle Signals of Success
⚡️ Execution Insight = 7 Sources to Find Insight
🧠 Curiosity Corner = Skiing down Mt. Everest with no oxygen
💼 Job Board = Privacy, Performance Marketing, and Planetary Scale
🛠️ Career Strategy
Competence Triggers: The Subtle Signals of Success
Ramit Sethi, the famed author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich, describes competence triggers as “very subtle signals, like certain phrases, body language, and practices that signal to someone, ‘Wow, this is Top Talent. I need this person working for me.’”
Competence triggers are harder to learn than commercial rigor. While commercial rigor is the substance, competence triggers are the style. They shape how others feel about someone’s ability. They explain why one person walks into a room and gains instant trust while another, with the same qualifications, struggles to make an impression.
Hiring managers read between the lines, observing tone, body language, and the way candidates structure answers.
They’re unconsciously asking themselves, Does this person seem like someone who gets things done?
When talking about unconscious signals and body language, we need to take a detour into bias. As Ian Siegel, CEO of ZipRecruiter, puts it, “Bias definitely exists, 100% of the time, and for every job … there is so much bias in the hiring process that combatting it with bias awareness training is impossible.”
Let’s do an exercise: in the below scenarios, pick the more appealing candidate based on snap judgement without further context:
Ivy League grad vs. community college grad
Microsoft employee vs. Walmart employee
Referral from current employee vs. LinkedIn easy apply
Homeowner vs. living in parents’ basement
Mac user vs. PC user
Gmail vs. Yahoo Mail
Nothing above evidences skill for a job, but we infer characteristics based on association: with institutions, products, and life circumstances.
By understanding competence triggers, we use the inevitability of bias to our advantage. Furthermore, they enable you to show commercial rigor in your behavior: if you deeply understand how your daily work impacts the bottom line, you’ll naturally communicate in ways that signal high competence.
For example, proactive communication is one of the most powerful competence triggers. The best candidates don’t wait for the other person to shepherd them through an interview. Instead, they drive the conversation. When asked, “Do you have any questions for us?” they don’t scramble with a generic query about company culture. They ask, “What’s the biggest challenge for your team right now?” or “How do you see this role evolving over the next year?”
They make it clear: they aren’t just looking for any job, but evaluating whether this company offers the appropriate fit for them.
⚡️ Execution Insight
7 Sources to Find Insight
Innovation doesn’t live in an R&D lab. It’s a mindset, and the raw material for it is insight: a sharp, imaginative understanding of an internal or external opportunity that can improve efficiency, generate revenue, or boost engagement.
The problem is that most people wait for insights to “strike,” like a bolt from the blue. They’ll wait forever.
The better move is to hunt systematically. The Harvard Business Review article “Where to Look for Insight” lays out seven repeatable “insight channels” you can cycle through when you need new ideas. In fact, these channels were what I used when I was an innovation consultant working for firms like Uber and Google.
Anomalies: Look for weird outliers in your data (unexpectedly high/low performance) and ask what they’re revealing.
Do This: You notice something unexpected in the data and investigate the hidden driver. Example: Russia had high internet adoption but low e-commerce; Lamoda built its own delivery + cash-on-delivery model to solve infrastructure constraints.
Not This: You see one odd spike/dip and immediately pivot strategy without checking if it’s noise, a measurement glitch, seasonality, or a one-off.
Confluence: Spot where macro trends intersect (tech + behavior + demographics) and mine the overlap.
Do This: You spot multiple trends colliding and build for the overlap. Example: mobile + social networking + shorter attention spans helped drive products like TikTok.
Not This: You chase a trendy mashup (“AI + X”) that sounds smart but doesn’t solve a real job-to-be-done, so it becomes a pile of features no one pulls for.
Frustrations: Start with irritations and pain points, then design the “no-brainer fix.”
Do This: You identify a recurring customer or internal process pain and remove friction with the simplest fix.
Not This: You “solve” the frustration by adding complexity (more steps, approvals, fields), or by making the customer experience worse to make your internal life easier.
Orthodoxies: Challenge sacred assumptions. If “this is how it’s always done,” that’s a clue.
Do This: You challenge a sacred belief and test a credible alternative. Example: defense orthodoxy was “expensive, sophisticated missiles”; a Raytheon team built lower-cost options using existing parts and a low-cost facility.
Not This: You question assumptions in theory, but don’t change constraints (incentives, risk tolerance, budget), so nothing actually changes.
Extremities: Learn from “positive deviants” at the fringes: power users, laggards, intense complainers.
Do This: You learn from “positive deviants” (visionary customers, intense enthusiasts/complainers, unusually effective employees) and translate what works to the mainstream.
Not This: You overfit to edge cases and build for power users only, leaving the majority confused or uninterested.
Voyages: Leave your desk. Immersion changes what you notice.
Do This: You get out of the building and observe real context. Example: an Intuit manager volunteered at a nonprofit to understand nonprofit finance workflows, which improved QuickBooks for nonprofits.
Not This: You do “customer visits” that are really sales calls or scripted interviews, then come back with opinions instead of observations.
Analogies: Steal smart patterns from other industries and adapt them.
Do This: You adapt a proven mechanism from another industry. Example: Coravin borrowed from surgery to let people pour wine without oxidizing the bottle.
Not This: You copy the surface tactic (the “what”) without the underlying mechanism (the “why”), so it doesn’t survive contact with your reality.
🧠 Curiosity Corner
Skiing down Mt. Everest with no oxygen
Leading up to the Winter Olympics, I started watching a lot of skiing videos on YouTube. This video of someone skiing down Mt. Everest caught my eye and I wanted to share it with you. Definitely worth a watch and certainly more entertaining than Alex Honnold’s Taipei 101 free solo.
💼 Job Board
Privacy, Performance Marketing, and Planetary Scale
Here are the 3 most interesting remote job openings I’ve seen this week:
If you want the jobs, please sign up for the newsletter :) That’s it for this week.
-Rahul from The DesAI Digest
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