The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
Agreement-Certainty Matrix: Accrual Engine vs. UI for Leave Balance
Two items on the same leave-balance backlog can look equally hard and need completely different planning rituals. The Agreement-Certainty Matrix is how I stopped estimating a compliance change like a design experiment.
- Product·3 min read
Agreement-Certainty Matrix: Triaging Flaky Tests Before Choosing a Fix
"Flaky test detection" sounds like one engineering problem. It's usually three, tangled together, each demanding a different response. Here's how the Agreement-Certainty Matrix pulls them apart before a team burns a quarter on the wrong fix.
- Product·3 min read
Agreement-Certainty Matrix: Sorting a CRM Backlog by How Well It's Actually Understood
Not every backlog item deserves the same process. The Agreement-Certainty Matrix sorts a quarter's worth of CRM work into simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic — and each zone gets a different kind of team, not just a different priority.
- Product·3 min read
Critical Uncertainties: How Far Into AI-Generated Tests Should shortest Go?
shortest could let a plain-English prompt author the whole test, not just the steps. Whether that's the right bet depends on two things nobody in the room actually knows yet — which is exactly the shape Critical Uncertainties was built to handle.
- Product·3 min read
Critical Uncertainties: Betting on AI Tutoring Without Pretending You Know the Future
course guru's leadership wanted a roadmap slot for AI tutoring. What they actually needed was a scenario map — because the two things that decide whether it works aren't things you can just go find out by asking someone.
- Product·3 min read
Panarchy: Roadmap Resilience for course guru
course guru doesn't have two cycles to worry about, it has three — and the slowest one belongs to Shopify, not to us. Here's how Panarchy surfaced that third scale, and what it changed about how we plan.
- Product·3 min read
Panarchy: Roadmap Resilience Across Timeframes
Ecocycle Planning maps one cycle. Panarchy maps three nested ones at once — this sprint, this year, the market underneath both — and forces a team to name where a fast crisis could take down a slow bet, or where a slow bet is quietly strangling a fast fix.
- Product·3 min read
Ecocycle Planning: Auditing course guru's Feature Lifecycle
course guru's roadmap had a legacy export nobody dared touch and a certificate feature that had been 'almost done' for two quarters. Ecocycle Planning is the workshop that puts both on the same map and forces the room to say out loud which one is the actual problem.
- Product·3 min read
Ecocycle Planning: Which Themes to Retire, Refresh, or Launch
Our theme catalog had forty-plus entries and nobody could say, in one sentence, which ones were dying, which were thriving, and which were still just an idea in a Figma file. Ecocycle Planning put every theme on one diagram and made the answer obvious.
- Product·3 min read
Ecocycle Planning: Retiring Brittle Test Suites Without a Fight
Nobody wants to be the person who deletes the test suite someone spent three sprints writing, even when it's been red-and-ignored for months. Ecocycle Planning gives a room permission to say so out loud — and to fund what's actually working.