The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
Min Specs: Cutting a Meeting-Prep Digest Down to Its Two Real Rules
The spec for Recap CRM's pre-meeting Prep Card had seventeen requirements and a six-week estimate. Min Specs asks one brutal question of each line — can we still hit the purpose if we break this rule? — and left us with three.
- Product·3 min read
Wise Crowds: A Manager Panel on the Leave-Approval Redesign
The managers approving leave requests every week have opinions they'll never put in a survey. Wise Crowds gets one of them into the client chair, turns their back to the room, and lets the honest version of the complaint come out.
- Product·3 min read
Wise Crowds: The Merchant Advisory Panel That Actually Advises
Every theme storefront eventually gets a merchant advisory panel that turns into a status update nobody wanted. Wise Crowds — structured peer consultation, chair-turn and all — is the fix, and it works even better once real merchants sit in the consultant seats.
- Product·3 min read
Agreement-Certainty Matrix: Should Course Guru Build Certificates?
Certificates look like a checkbox feature — every LMS has one, so why debate it? Because for a Shopify-embedded app, the checkbox hides three real disagreements. Here's how the Agreement-Certainty Matrix stopped a team from copying a feature that didn't fit.
- 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.