If people bought cars only to go from point A to point B, Ferrari wouldn’t exist. If a Rolex was valued for its superior timekeeping, bankers wouldn’t add another to a collection with every promotion. If innovation were just about delivering new features, that friend you know wouldn’t upgrade their iPhone each year.
Products are more than functional objects: they’re vessels of meaning intertwined with our identities and aspirations - even if we don’t think of them that way. Understanding what something does is easy. Understanding what it means is much harder. It is difficult to ‘make something people want’ - but just as important to ‘make people want something’.
This is how I see adoption. The gap between what a product, tool, or experience can do for someone and whether they’ll actually use it is almost never technical. It’s about what it means: what it signals to others, what it says about who you are, and whether it fits the life you’re already living. This is true for AI tools, consumer products, healthcare services, and luxury goods alike. Whether buying Post-Its or Prada, there’s more than just money at stake.
I’m a strategist and researcher who helps founders and executives see the human frictions that determine whether a product gets adopted or ignored. Most of my work is with teams navigating product, brand, and go-to-market at critical inflection points: YC-backed AI startups, health tech companies, and enterprise teams building for behavioral change.
Before going independent, I spent four years at Gemic leading strategic ethnographic research for firms like Google, Pearson, Meta, Ford, and BMW — helping inform $100M+ allocation decisions, new product pipelines, and international go-to-market strategy.
I studied philosophy and economics at UBC. Before that, I worked as a journalist and represented India at the International Philosophy Olympiad where I won the bronze medal — the country’s highest finish that year.
This site is where I think in public. If something here resonates, I’d love to hear from you.
My name is Arth - Sanskrit for “meaning.”