https://www.pavan.blog/articles Writing on AI agents, product management, and growth by Pavan Raheja. en Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.pavan.blog/articles/ai-made-building-cheap https://www.pavan.blog/articles/ai-made-building-cheap Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Shreyas Doshi is right: AI won't save you from building the wrong thing. I have the graveyard to prove it — a year of systems my agents built fast and correctly that one cheap test would have killed before any code. Here's the test, and where judgment actually comes from. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/mechanics-travel-preconditions-dont https://www.pavan.blog/articles/mechanics-travel-preconditions-dont Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT I once improved a mechanic's first step by 30% and the loop still didn't close. Here's what that taught me about borrowing what works elsewhere — and why it matters more now that building is nearly free. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/glasshouse-case-study https://www.pavan.blog/articles/glasshouse-case-study Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT How I decide whether an AI agent is allowed to act on its own — the evaluation gates, the three products I killed with the numbers shown, and the outage that changed how I monitor everything. Written for product people. No jargon, no returns, no hand-waving. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/architecture-of-a-self-driving-system https://www.pavan.blog/articles/architecture-of-a-self-driving-system Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Replit's 'self-driving company' essay shows what agent fleets can do once trusted. This is the architecture underneath such a system — seven layers, drawn from one I operate in production, held together by two rules: no agent promotes itself, and no agent grants itself resources. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/evals-for-agents-that-act https://www.pavan.blog/articles/evals-for-agents-that-act Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Grading a chatbot's answer is one problem. Deciding whether to let an agent touch production is a different one. You don't score the output — you grant authority, in stages, behind gates that it has to earn. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/building-n8n-workflow-from-claude-code-via-mcp https://www.pavan.blog/articles/building-n8n-workflow-from-claude-code-via-mcp Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT I built and ran a working automation without opening the tool's UI — driven end-to-end from Claude Code through MCP. The interesting part isn't that it worked. It's that the build path is itself guardrailed. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/guardrailed-agent-human-in-the-loop https://www.pavan.blog/articles/guardrailed-agent-human-in-the-loop Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT A copilot suggests; an agent acts. The moment an agent can act on its own, one question becomes the entire product: is it confident AND safe enough to do this without a human? Here's a small, working pattern — with the actual workflow. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/risk-guardian-rfc-7218 https://www.pavan.blog/articles/risk-guardian-rfc-7218 Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT An evaluator that catches a bad output after the fact is sometimes too late — you can't un-send a webhook or un-drain a budget. RFC #7218 proposes the missing layer: a deterministic, pre-action safety gate for autonomous agents. Here's the design. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/production-ai-agents-reliability https://www.pavan.blog/articles/production-ai-agents-reliability Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT The hardest part of building with AI agents isn't getting them to work. It's noticing when they've quietly stopped. Five reliability lessons from a year of running autonomous agents that trade real money. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/mashkor-product-growth-story https://www.pavan.blog/articles/mashkor-product-growth-story Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT From 250 orders a day to 3.5x users and 2.8x revenue in 18 months. Here's the full playbook — discovery, ops, acquisition, and AI/ML — from inside the building. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/ui-ux-in-outcome-oriented-models-innovations-shaping-tomorro https://www.pavan.blog/articles/ui-ux-in-outcome-oriented-models-innovations-shaping-tomorro Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Introduction: In the era of outcome-oriented models driven by AI and ML technologies, the landscape of UI/UX design is undergoing a profound transformation. As products and industries embrace declarative,... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/unlocking-growth-the-mashkor-journey https://www.pavan.blog/articles/unlocking-growth-the-mashkor-journey Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Achieving 3x monthly run rate in user and revenue growth in just 18 months! 📈 Rarely shared publicly, but here's the behind-the-scenes story of our remarkable journey. ✨ Market Insight: - Kuwait's population: 4.82... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/leveraging-ai-ml-to-enhance-user-activation-and-engagements https://www.pavan.blog/articles/leveraging-ai-ml-to-enhance-user-activation-and-engagements Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Innovative strategies are crucial for maintaining a competitive edge, particularly in user engagement and activation. This post outlines our integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/optimizing-the-activation-funnel-iteratively-to-improve-the https://www.pavan.blog/articles/optimizing-the-activation-funnel-iteratively-to-improve-the Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Introduction - Wanted to share the story of working with Mashkor for the initial 8 months working here about how we worked to... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/unlocking-success-with-mvps-enhancing-customer-experience https://www.pavan.blog/articles/unlocking-success-with-mvps-enhancing-customer-experience Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT Wanted to share some learnings about MVP's. In our fast-paced world of product and growth, especially for domain in our which is highly operation-driven business, the mantra was clear to test out ideas soon – MVPs... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/the-evolution-to-product-growth-function https://www.pavan.blog/articles/the-evolution-to-product-growth-function Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT Having received numerous inquiries from my network about the nuances between Growth Product leaders and traditional Product leaders, I thought to shed light on this topic from all the work I have been doing and how its... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/growth-strategy-clear https://www.pavan.blog/articles/growth-strategy-clear Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT In the 8-week boot camp project with GrowthX, after the four weeks of deep diving in modules, we had to apply the concepts and fundamentals we learned to real-time products. We got the... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/growth-check https://www.pavan.blog/articles/growth-check Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT I have been a Digital Marketing professional for eight years and specialized in SEO for seven years. I have worked with numerous varied projects to achieve results. I also have run websites for fun and flipped them... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/first-surfing-lesson https://www.pavan.blog/articles/first-surfing-lesson Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT My first surfing lesson. You cant stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. It took me 90 minutes to get it manageable — crumbled a few times, but got there. https://www.pavan.blog/articles/physical-transformation https://www.pavan.blog/articles/physical-transformation Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT Part-1 (Jan-18) Lately, I have been continually asked for inputs from a lot of friends, for the quick physical transformation in a short time. I have been... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/pain-with-reflection-awesome-growth https://www.pavan.blog/articles/pain-with-reflection-awesome-growth Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT This is an idea has had a huge impact on me, a long time back unknowingly and now knowingly. I will try to discuss only the emotional pain, causes and some remedies to deal with it. Also, in many cases, even physical... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/intuitions-impulsiveness-errors-mistakes-selfhelp https://www.pavan.blog/articles/intuitions-impulsiveness-errors-mistakes-selfhelp Sun, 08 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT I have been intuitive and impulsive for most of early life, which has got me into trouble on a lot of occasions. I have been lucky to receive tough love several times from special people in my life and realize some of... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/opinion-and-empathy https://www.pavan.blog/articles/opinion-and-empathy Tue, 31 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT Happen to just come across this image, and it just hit me to the core. I just kept reading about Empathy and Opinions in so many places. It really did not make me understand to clearly, a lot of my Mentors and the... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/mumbai-pune-expressway-an-eye-opener-to-indian-inequality https://www.pavan.blog/articles/mumbai-pune-expressway-an-eye-opener-to-indian-inequality Mon, 30 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT India ranks 130th amongst the 188 countries on the Human Development Index, however, once inequality is factored in, we drop even further to rank 150th. In addition to employment strategies, the report calls for the... https://www.pavan.blog/articles/hello https://www.pavan.blog/articles/hello Tue, 20 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT Howdy, So my last vacation of my year was in Thailand, I just loved the vibes of that country, on a personal experience it had a blend of the feeling you get in India an Island as well. The moment I landed in...