How I help
I sit between the people who own the product and the people who build it, and I translate in both directions. A product manager gets an honest answer instead of a polite one. An engineer gets a reason instead of a ticket. When a launch starts to slip, I go looking for the dependency nobody wrote down and get it unblocked before it turns into a meeting.
I stay close to the code. I read pull requests, I look at the slow queries, I care about the boring parts that keep a service up at three in the morning. Not because I don’t trust the team, but because good technical calls come from people who still touch the work.
And I spend real time on people. Weekly one-to-ones, direct feedback, and a plan for where each person is going next. The engineers I’ve mentored who became leads themselves are the work I’m proudest of.
Seven things I believe
- 01Clarity beats speedA team that knows why it’s building something moves faster than a team that’s only told to hurry.
- 02Say the hard thing earlyBad news in week one is a plan. Bad news in week ten is a crisis.
- 03Decide, then write it downA decision that isn’t written will be argued again next month.
- 04Small releases, oftenBig launches are where the risk hides. I’d rather ship ten small things than one large surprise.
- 05Feedback is a habitNot an annual event. If a review contains a surprise, I’ve failed somewhere earlier.
- 06Care about the billGood engineering shows up in the cloud invoice. Slow queries and lazy architecture cost real money.
- 07Grow people past youThe best result of mentoring someone is that they stop needing you.
How I use AI
I’m not an AI researcher and I don’t pretend to be one. I’m someone who has an AI assistant open all day and uses it the way I used to use a whiteboard.
When someone on a team says “what if we could…”, I like to come back a few days later with something that runs. A small demo answers more questions than a slide deck, and it tells you quickly whether an idea deserves a real budget. I’ve built a good number of these prototypes and proofs of concept, and I’m happy to show you a few.
In my own products, AI writes the first draft of a trip so a group of friends has something to argue about, and AI-assisted development lets a tiny team keep a pace that used to need a much bigger one. I know where it helps and where it gets in the way, and I’m honest about both.