The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
Risk Reduction: The Vocabulary I Use Under Pressure
Most teams don't lack judgment, they lack a shared vocabulary for talking about risk before it becomes an incident. These are the six tools I actually reach for when a decision needs to be fast, reversible where it can be, and scrutinized where it can't.
- Product·3 min read
Turning Strategy Into a Shippable Sequence
The roadmap and backlog layers are where every strategy either becomes real or quietly dies in a spreadsheet. Here's what I've actually learned running RICE, Cost of Delay, WSJF, and Scrum vs. Kanban vs. Shape Up against real backlogs — including where each one lied to me.
- Product·3 min read
Discovery Frameworks That Actually Change What You Build
Objectives and roadmaps are only as good as the discovery underneath them — and most discovery I've watched happen is just feature requests wearing a lab coat. Here's the set of frameworks that actually separates a real customer problem from someone's opinion, the gate that decides whether a validated problem is worth building for, and where each one still fooled me before it earned its keep.
- Product·3 min read
Strategy Formation: How to Tell a Real Strategy From a Wish
Most documents labeled 'strategy' are actually goals wearing a strategy's clothes. Here's the kernel test I run to catch that, plus the three other frameworks I reach for once diagnosis alone isn't enough — Playing to Win, Wardley Mapping, and 7 Powers.
- Product·3 min read
The Strategy Cascade: Frameworks I Actually Reach For
Every team I've been on has argued about priorities every single sprint. Eventually I noticed the argument was never about the backlog — it was about a missing layer above it. Here's the strategy cascade I use to find that layer, and where the rest of this series goes to work through each one.
- Product·3 min read
Integrated~Autonomy: One Accrual Engine, Eleven Countries, No Winner
Every country Leave Balance expanded into added exceptions to a core accrual engine that was supposed to be universal. The fix wasn't a bigger engine or eleven forks — it was ninety minutes spent refusing to choose between them.
- Product·3 min read
Integrated~Autonomy: Ending the Standardize-Then-Fragment Pendulum
Shortest had swung between one mandated test runner and squad-by-squad freedom twice in three years. Integrated~Autonomy refused to run the vote a third time and asked a different question: what would let us be more standardized and more autonomous at once?
- Product·3 min read
Social Network Webbing: Finding the Instructors Other Instructors Copy
Course Guru's completion-nudge feature had 400 instructors eligible and 26 using it. Webbing the instructor network — from the outside, with our own support team drawing — showed the practice was spreading through three Discord servers we didn't run.
- Product·3 min read
Social Network Webbing: The Adoption Map That Isn't the Org Chart
Six weeks after launching structured call notes in Recap CRM, adoption inside our own GTM org had stalled at 31%. Social Network Webbing found the reason on a sheet of butcher paper: the person everyone actually copied wasn't on any of our rollout lists.
- Product·3 min read
Shift & Share: Spreading the Workarounds Before They Become Policy
Four Leave Balance support pods each had their own private ritual for surviving the year-end carryover run. Shift & Share put those rituals on four tables at once — and turned three undocumented workarounds into two product bugs and one feature.