Writing

Notes on AI platforms and the teams that build them.

Short essays, written to be argued with. Some are about the unglamorous parts of shipping AI inside an organization that has auditors — what "done" means, what makes autonomy sellable. The rest are about the other half of the job: how product teams get pointed in a direction, given the room to decide, and coached once they're there.

Evals Are the Contract, Not the Gate

An AI feature without an eval set isn't untested — it's unspecified. Why the cases, the grading, and the bar belong in the spec, and what changes in a team when acceptance moves left.

Governance Is a Feature

Identity, auditability, and reversibility aren't a compliance pass at the end. They're the currency you buy agent autonomy with — and retrofitting them costs you a year of removing capability.

When Both Teams Are Right

A deadlock between two competent teams usually means the problem has two regimes and nobody has named them. One question that finds the split instead of picking a winner.

Discovery Is a Habit, Not a Phase

What SVPG's product operating model and Teresa Torres's continuous discovery actually demand — and why installing the ceremonies without moving decision rights produces discovery theater.

Err Toward Deciding

Teams rarely lose to wrong decisions. They lose to undecided ones. An aspirational vision, a strategy tactical enough to rule things out, and naming which door you're standing in front of.

Three Conversations, Kept Apart

The weekly 1:1, the career conversation, and the performance conversation have different horizons and different owners. Running them as one meeting makes all three worse.

More in progress — on platform adoption, and on what actually changes when prototyping stops being expensive. If you want to argue with any of these, email me.