From the field to the roadmap

On football, injuries that didn't fully heal, and the instinct I've had to work against ever since.

I played centre midfield.

If you’ve never played there, the job is hard to describe, because almost none of it shows up in a highlight reel. You’re not the one who scores. You’re reading the shape of the game two passes before it exists, scrambling for space that hasn’t opened yet, watching the man rather than the ball, and trusting nine other people to be where you think they’ll be. Then, occasionally, the gap appears and you take the shot.

The way I’ve always put it: you play the player, not the game.

I did that at national level, and as an athlete enrolled with the Sports Authority of India. It was the organising fact of my early life — the thing that determined what time I woke up, what I ate, who my friends were, and what I thought I was for.

It didn’t end. It slowed.

People expect a clean ending to this kind of story. An injury, a final match, a decision, a door closing.

Mine isn’t that.

What happened was an accumulation. A torn ACL. A back injury. An ankle. Then more, in the way injuries arrive once your body has learned the habit. Nothing in that list is a single dramatic full stop. Together they were a negotiation I kept losing, until the level I was playing at quietly became a level I used to play at.

So I wouldn’t say the chapter ended. It slowed down — or, more accurately, it had to be slowed down, which is a different sentence and a worse one.

And I want to be honest about the residue, because this is the part that usually gets edited out of pieces like this: when I look back, I feel sad. Discontented. Not constantly, and not in a way that runs my life. But it’s there, and it hasn’t resolved, and I’ve stopped expecting it to. There’s a version of that story where the athlete finds a greater purpose and closes the book with gratitude. I’m not going to pretend I’m in it.

I still play. Badminton, table tennis, whatever’s going. Just not at a level where anything is at stake.

What actually carried over

The transferable-skills version of this essay writes itself, and I distrust it. Discipline, teamwork, resilience — every athlete-turned-something claims those, and they’re so general they can’t be wrong.

What genuinely carried over is narrower, and most of it is positional.

Centre midfield is an education in reading situations rather than objects. You’re looking for where the opportunity is about to be, not where the ball currently is. I do a version of that now with markets and user behaviour, and I’m better at it than I have any right to be given how little of it I was formally taught.

It’s also an education in depending on people you don’t control. You can play a perfect ball into space and it comes to nothing because the run wasn’t made. You don’t get to file a ticket about that. You learn to build the kind of understanding with people that makes the run happen anyway.

And it teaches repetition without an audience. The tiny improvements that only become visible after years, the work in the weeks between matches. Most of product management is that, dressed differently — the unglamorous discovery, the research nobody sees, the same conversation with a customer for the fourth time.

The part I’ve had to unlearn

Here’s the one that matters, and it’s not a strength.

My instinct — my actual personality, the thing I default to under pressure — is to do it myself. Take it on, carry it, get it done. That instinct was useful on a pitch, where it sometimes genuinely was on me, and it’s been useful in most of my life.

It is not what product management rewards.

What I learned, mostly from the people around me early in my career, is this: a team consistently delivering on the right problems will beat one person juggling ten things on their plate. Every time. Not occasionally — structurally.

My direction can be right
and still be worse than the process I skipped.

That’s the uncomfortable half. It’s not that the do-it-yourself instinct produces bad answers. It often produces good ones. But a good answer arrived at alone has skipped the part where other perspectives make it bigger and better, and a process that invites those perspectives will out-perform my correct-but-unexamined instinct over any horizon longer than a sprint.

So I’ve had to separate two things I used to think were the same: my personality, and how I conduct myself professionally. Both have their advantages. They are not obliged to match. Learning to hold them apart has probably been the single most useful adjustment of my working life, and I still catch myself reverting when a week gets hard.

Centre midfield, it turns out, was telling me this the whole time. The position exists to make other people effective. I just heard it as a compliment about my vision rather than an instruction about my ego.

Where the frame breaks

I’d add one caution, since sports analogies get over-applied in this industry.

A match has a scoreboard, a final whistle, a referee, and rules that apply equally to both sides. Product has none of these. There’s no moment where you’re told you won, the rules are asymmetric and change underneath you, and the competitor you’re obsessing over is usually less important than the customer you’re ignoring. An athlete’s instinct to beat someone is the part of this inheritance I’d treat most carefully — it’s a strong engine pointed, by default, at the wrong target.

Still playing

The line I’d land on isn’t about the roadmap at all. It’s something I wrote about myself elsewhere on this site and only later realised was the whole point:

I’m competitive enough to care about winning, but not competitive enough to stop playing after losing.

That’s the only thing from that era I’d want to keep permanently. Not the level, not the selection, not the body I had at nineteen — none of which I get back. Just the willingness to show up for the next one, at whatever standard is available to me now.

The knee still complains. I still play.