Where I'm coming from

I started as a self-taught software engineer working on embedded hardware, became an engineering manager leading a team, then moved into product management. The journey there ran through early-stage startups building from zero to one, into bigger surface areas in gaming and enterprise software, with founder consulting along the way. Across all of it I keep coming back to the same gap: between how organizations say they work and how they actually work. Two decades haven’t really been about any of those industries. They’ve been about that gap.

These days I sit between customers and product teams in enterprise software, finding patterns across hundreds of conversations and making sure that signal reaches the people making roadmap decisions.

What I write about

Most of my posts start from the same instinct: something looks like it should work, but doesn’t. OKR systems that hit every target while the business stagnates. Prioritization frameworks that everyone agrees with and nobody follows. AI adoption strategies built on demos instead of workflows. The interesting question is rarely “what went wrong.” It’s what game were people actually playing?

The recurring themes are historical patterns that explain current ones, why intellectual honesty is a competitive advantage most organizations are bad at, and the hidden skills of product management that don’t show up on a job description.

What I build

The engineering background never fully left. I still build tools for problems I run into. Posthorn is a self-hosted email gateway that sits between every app on my infrastructure and my transactional mail provider. This site runs on Hugo, with comments, analytics, search, and contact form all self-hosted on a single VPS.

Why this site exists

Translation is probably the most undervalued skill in the field. Customers describe symptoms, engineers want specifications, leadership wants strategy. The work is turning one into the others without losing the signal.

Writing is how I think. Most of the posts here started as confusion I was trying to dissolve for myself. The frameworks are sketches I wanted to refer back to. None of it is going to tell you what to do.

The best response to a post is a specific counterargument. The second best is “this changed how I think about X.” The contact page works, and comments are open on every post.