Things I've Done

What did I believe going in? What happened when that belief met an actual customer? What did I miss? What would I do differently now? And what have I learned well enough that it guides how I work without needing to be written on a conference room wall?

That’s what I want to collect here: the stories behind an accumulating set of operating principles.

Sometimes a customer problem has a perfectly good solution that requires building nothing. Sometimes an important customer deserves a yes that interrupts your strategy. Sometimes an AI answer needs to show its workings because hiding the machinery also hides the reason it went wrong.

Those beliefs came from somewhere. There were people, disagreements, constraints, mistakes, and decisions I had to live with.

I’ve spent too much time listing professional accomplishments here and there. I’ve endured job interviews that ask “Tell me about a time…” questions. Google once asked me about launching a product on the moon. Apparently Earth had become insufficiently challenging.

I’d rather start with the real situations. Follow them far enough to understand how they changed my judgment. Connect the experiences that keep showing up in the way I work.

I started at DoubleClick helping customers understand, evaluate, and implement advertising technology. That work took me through sales engineering, interaction design, product management, and a stint helping grow the team in Sydney. I wanted to taste everything on the menu and play every instrument in the band. Nothing has changed.

Since then, I’ve helped start and worked in small companies where the boundaries between product, sales, and customer success were largely theoretical, and in larger organizations building B2B SaaS. I enjoy the customer conversation as much as the product problem it reveals.

Lately, I have discovered that agents are really no different. Your users have not changed. Your delivery has. UI is a constraint you no longer have. Now you test differently, you evaluate differently, you set the bar for releasing differently. But that doesn't change anything, really. You focus on the same customer needs. The same jobs to be done. The difference? New possibilities. No waiting for me to build a UX that you may or may not understand. It's down to brass tacks. I actually don’t know what brass tacks are. But it sounds good. Maybe even demos well.

Jobs and professional outcomes come and go. One day you’re fiercely defending revenue, a retention north star guiding your every move. The next, you’re desperately looking for product-market fit. Occasionally, you get a shot at blowing up a paradigm.

Music is where I get to take that shot whenever I feel like it. Whether anything actually blows up is another matter.

I make it for one listener: me. If someone else likes it, great. But I don’t need a business case to follow an idea somewhere strange. Sometimes I just want to hear what happens.