WRITING · NOTES FROM THE WORK

What I'm writing about.

Essays on PM craft, the AI tooling I actually use, and the small systems I build for myself — published when there's something worth your time, not on a schedule.

Jul 16 I Built a PM Operating System in One Afternoon

Managing 30–50 things across five product areas without the fragmentation tax — an AI-assisted operating layer that separates PM actions from team deliverables.

product-management Jul 14 My AI Bot Kept Telling People to Go Away

Finding the bug was easy. Proving I'd fixed it nearly fooled me — a lesson in trusting decision-time logs over replay.

genai Jul 10 The $22-a-Month Sentiment Pipeline

Adding LLM-powered quality measurement to an AI product — as a single SQL column, with no ML infrastructure — plus the taxonomy disaster in the middle.

genai Jul 2 Your AI Metric Is Meaningless Without a Benchmark

The same numbers can read as 'behind' or 'three years ahead' depending entirely on the yardstick — and sourcing the yardstick is the real work.

genai Jun 24 Separate Measurement From Interpretation

The cleanest dashboards give numbers one home and meaning another — evidence and narrative should connect, not compete.

product-management Jun 16 The Best Infrastructure Is No Infrastructure

I inherited a status page that lied through every outage. I fixed it by deleting the whole pipeline and replacing it with one config entry.

infrastructure Jun 8 Your AI Doesn't Need a Data Dump — It Needs the Right Queries

Rewiring a weekly report from a manual CSV export to targeted live queries made it faster, fully automated, and far more reliable.

mcp May 28 The Most Expensive Line of Code Is a Hardcoded Path

A colleague's internal tool ran fine on his machine and crashed for everyone else. The cause — and the one-line habit that prevents it.

engineering May 20 Stop Re-Explaining Yourself to Your AI — Write It a Rule

If you keep giving your assistant the same feedback, that's a missing rule, not a one-off. Also: why 'short' and 'clear' aren't the same goal.

ai May 12 Exec Feedback Is a Symptom, Not a Spec

A senior leader kept reacting to a system without giving requirements. The job wasn't to guess what they wanted — it was to translate 'this feels off' into a concrete, shrinking decision.

product-management Apr 29 I Built a Second Brain That Actually Talks Back

A self-hosted personal AI memory server, $0/month, that every AI tool I use can search.