Building products that respect your time: A conversation with Akshay Rana

OpsMatters covers the people building the operational layer of the modern web, the tools, systems, and thinking that make digital work actually work. Our guest, Akshay Rana fits that brief precisely. A product leader with a background spanning enterprise cybersecurity, identity infrastructure at Fortune 50 scale, and SaaS platform development, he is not someone you would typically associate with a quiet solo side project. Yet in September 2025, he shipped Joyscroller, a Chrome extension that replaces your new tab with a curated feed of your own saved bookmarks. No algorithm. No noise. Just the things you already decided were worth keeping. At a moment when attention is the most contested resource in tech, we wanted to talk to the product mind behind a tool that is quietly pushing back.

Akshay, you have spent the bulk of your career inside large organisations, managing complex systems with significant operational stakes. Joyscroller is about as far from that world as a product can get. What were you actually trying to solve when you started building it?

It started with a personal frustration that I suspect a lot of people in this industry share. I had hundreds of bookmarks, articles, threads, resources, things I had saved with genuine intention, and I almost never went back to them. At the same time I was opening new tabs constantly and ending up somewhere I had not planned to be. The problem was not that I lacked good content. The problem was that my environment was not set up to surface it. Every new tab was an invitation to drift. Joyscroller just changes what that invitation looks like.

The product is strikingly minimal. No accounts, no sync, no social layer, no recommendation engine. For someone who has built products with very large operational footprints, was that restraint a deliberate philosophy or a practical starting point?

It was both, honestly, but the philosophy came first. When you spend years building systems that are designed to retain users and drive engagement, you develop a very clear sense of what those mechanisms actually do to people. Retention features are not neutral. They are designed to keep you inside a loop. With Joyscroller I wanted to build something that had no interest in your time beyond the moment it was useful to you. The minimal footprint is not a version one limitation. It is the point. Adding an algorithm would have made it a different product entirely, and not one I wanted to make.

You shipped this as an independent project alongside a full time product role. A lot of people in senior product positions talk about building on the side but very few actually ship. What does it take operationally to go from an idea to something live on the Chrome Web Store?

Most side projects fail at the point where the idea has to become a series of unglamorous decisions. Choosing the tech, handling the Chrome Web Store submission process, writing the privacy policy, thinking about edge cases nobody will ever thank you for considering. None of that is exciting but all of it has to happen before a single user can install it. What helped me was treating it like a real product brief rather than a hobby. I gave it a problem statement, a defined user, and a clear constraint set. Once those were fixed the build became much more straightforward. The constraint of keeping it lightweight, for instance, forced a kind of clarity that a blank canvas never would.

The insight behind Joyscroller, that your new tab is an environment that shapes your behaviour rather than just a blank starting point, feels like it comes from someone who has thought seriously about how digital interfaces affect people. Where does that thinking come from in your career?

A lot of it comes from working on authentication and onboarding flows at scale. When you are designing the moment a user first encounters a product, or the moment they are deciding whether to abandon a checkout, you become very sensitive to how small environmental cues drive large behavioural outcomes. A button placement, a default state, a moment of friction that was not there yesterday. These things move numbers significantly. Once you see that clearly in a professional context it is very hard to unsee it in your own daily experience. I started noticing how much of my own browsing was not driven by intention but by defaults I had never chosen consciously. Joyscroller is my attempt to change one of those defaults.

Looking ahead, how do you see AI shaping the kind of independent software you want to build next, and what excites or concerns you about where that is heading?

AI has genuinely lowered the barrier to shipping, and I think that is broadly a good thing for builders who have a clear problem they are trying to solve. What concerns me is what happens when the barrier drops for people who do not. We are already seeing a wave of what people call slopware, products that exist because AI made them easy to generate rather than because anyone identified a real need. They look finished, they have landing pages, they are on the App Store, but there is no actual thinking behind them. No genuine problem, no considered tradeoff, no point of view. I think the next few years are going to require users to develop much sharper instincts for distinguishing between software that was built with intention and software that was simply produced. As for what I want to build next, I am drawn to the same territory Joyscroller sits in. The overlap between how people manage their attention, how they learn, and how digital environments either support or undermine both of those things. AI will be part of how I build it, but the question it answers will still have to come from somewhere human.