About

Hello, I'm Rahmaan! 👋

I'm an engineer turned product manager living in the (Metro) Atlanta, Georgia. I studied the field of computer engineering and digital signal processing at Georgia Tech. After my college days, I followed quite an interesting career path that allowed me to wear many hats, including those of a system engineer, quality engineer, and frontend software engineer. Ultimately, I discovered my love of building rich, delightful experiences for customers and found the art of solving human computer interaction issues to be my passion (thanks in part to my love of gaming).

Currently, I am a Senior Product Manager at Pantheon Platform, hoping to use my talent and build out their Product Telemetry tooling in their ongoing PLG (product-led growth) efforts!

Welcome to Zero Counts!

Pleasantries aside, it would be my pleasure to introduce you to my site, Zero Counts. I made this site as a combination of a professional site, a frontend playground, and a blog of my personal thoughts. For those interested, it's a site created using: GatsbyJS, Netlify, and a theme provided by LekoArts. I will be posting content here for my many passions and interest areas, including product design and management, technologies and gadgets, gaming, and anything else I enjoy talking about 😅.

Now, you may be asking why is this site called Zero Counts?

When I was designing this site, one of the areas that gave me the most trouble was how I wanted to identify this space. Coding up the site in GatsbyJS? Easy! Thinking about what content to add? Easy! But naming the site and thinking about my brand? Mind-boggling traumatic.

Eventually, I stumbled into the name musing about some of my fond gaming memories of playing Crash Bandicoot 2. Crash was a game I played many times in my youth, and it was always a game I would pull out of the cabinet whenever my cousins from Chicago visited. Often while playing, we would burn through our lives in the game, and the stress of finishing the level would be insurmountable. I would see the life counter hit 1, thinking this was surely the end of our run as I was about to lose our last life by falling into a pit. But my cousin would remind me, without missing a beat, "Don't worry man! Zero counts too! We got one more chance!".

And recalling the memory now, that statement really stood out to me. Within such a simple phrase stands a comment about how things aren't truly over yet and there's always a path or chance available that may not be so obvious. There was another path hidden behind something as innocuous as a zero. And it's a lesson that would come up in so many other ways. Heck, even in computer science and mathematics, we were taught not to forget the zero index in arrays, a concept that often lead to simple, overlooked mistakes in calculations.

In that sense, I decided to name this blog after that notion, because it's a philosophy I still use today in most of my problem solving. There's always a path or route hidden somewhere, and you just have to warp and change your angle of thinking to see it revealed. It's a lesson that can help in your career, and it's an aspect of product management that I often educate my peers in as well, whenever they hit a wall in their work. It's as simple as saying "Don't worry. Zero Counts".