Everything, organized by how you read.
AI Development Starts with Discovery
AI inverted the economics of product development: demos got cheap, verification stayed expensive. A case for moving discovery to the front and putting an evaluation gate before build.
Protect the Phases
Early feedback that means to save time is usually the feedback that costs the most of it. On why phases deserve a doorman, and why the leader has to make the pushback cheap to say.
Turn-Down Service
The whole industry answers every AI product question with a chat window. For clinicians who spend their day in conversation, that's the wrong gift, and a case for ambient help over one more thing to talk to.
Skip the Courier
Two leaders asked me to carry their reorganization cases up the chain this week. Why I declined both, and why the refusal did more coaching than any case I could have delivered for them.
The Cheap Conversation
Strip the tooling away and my best AI habit is just briefing, the oldest management technology there is: spend the hour where mistakes are free, then delegate.
Two Spikes, One Role
We ran two finalists through an identical interview spine and still nearly picked wrong, because one panelist was measuring against a different job. What the debrief is really for.
Perforated, Not Erased
A field report from a Config Leadership Collective session on building AI-native orgs, and why roles perforate rather than disappear.
The Quiet Half
When work happens in public, the quietest strong thinkers can disappear. Making their work visible is a leadership job, not a performance to assign back.
Maintenance Mode Can Disappear
Maintenance felt like a permanent tax until a small builders pod cleared the backlog. The tax turned out to be a choice.
The Bottleneck Isn't the People
When a build goes sideways, we blame the people. Usually the real constraint is the system they're working inside.
Prototype First, Decide Together
Flipping the order so design and applied AI prototype before the handoff, putting the hardest decision next to something real.
Exceptions Are Pilots
A practical tool for moving a structure-averse partner: propose a pilot with a learning goal instead of asking for an exception.
Innovation Lives in the Front Yard
A designer felt blocked from innovating. The reframe that unstuck her: stop waiting for greenfield and look at the front yard you already own.
People First, Then Permissions
A complex roles-and-permissions UX crit, and the question behind the functionality: do you model a system around its own structure, or around the job the person is trying to do?
I Needed to See the Machine
I came into a demo of our new build system worried about prioritization. Seeing how it actually works dissolved that worry and surfaced a harder one.
The Foundations We Stopped Funding
Our reporting infrastructure hit a ceiling we chose a year ago. It's a small version of a pattern worth naming: funding the new while the foundations quietly degrade.
Visibility Is the Work, Too
The communication most ICs treat as overhead is what gets read as leadership. Three conversations this week on why visibility is a craft, not a soft skill.
Show Them the Real App
A prototype that doesn't look like the real product teaches engineers the wrong thing. The fidelity bar I hold for what goes to eng, and the toolchain that makes it reachable.