The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
Cascading OKRs to Department and Product Without a Status Report
Most OKR cascades are arithmetic disguised as alignment — the company KR divided by headcount becomes every team's KR, and nobody notices that no actual thinking happened between the layers.
- Product·3 min read
Where Discovery Interviews and Marketing Research Are the Same Conversation
A product manager and a marketer sitting in the same customer interview, taking completely different notes, never comparing them — this is the most common waste of customer contact in organizations that can afford neither the waste nor the duplication.
- Product·3 min read
Mining Support Tickets into the Opportunity Solution Tree, Not Just a Bug Queue
A support team closing 200 tickets a week while the product team builds features nobody asked for is not a resource problem — it's a signal-routing problem, and the fix is a two-hour extraction pass that turns the support inbox into the richest discovery input your team has.
- Product·3 min read
Before You Write an OKR — OKRs vs. Rocks vs. a Bare North Star
Three goal-setting systems, each claiming to be the best — and all three are right, for different organizations at different stages, which is why the real skill isn't writing OKRs but knowing which framework your team actually needs.
- Product·3 min read
What a PO Absorbs vs. Hands Off, by Team Size — and the Hat Nobody Actually Writes
At eight people the PO role develops a blind spot so consistent I've started calling it the orphan gap — QA ownership falls through the space between the PO's shoulders and the team's expectations, and nobody notices until the first real bug reaches production.
- Product·3 min read
When to Sit in on Discovery, Not Just the Demo
Founders who only show up for demos are perpetually surprised by what the team built — because they're seeing the output of decisions they could have influenced three months earlier, at a cost thirty times higher.
- Product·3 min read
When You Need a Dedicated BA, and When the PO Already Does This Job
A team that hired a BA too early burned six months of salary on documentation nobody read; a team that hired one too late lost a regulatory deal because requirements were scattered across Slack threads. The split point isn't team size — it's the ratio of domain complexity to product complexity.
- AI·3 min read
Workflow vs Agent Team: Two Ways to Run Many Claudes
Once you're spawning subagents, you hit a fork: let the lead agent decide who to spawn and when, or script the orchestration deterministically up front. They feel similar and fail differently. Here's how I pick.
- AI·3 min read
The Subagent I Deleted: A Field Note on Layer Discipline
I wrote a subagent that worked. I deleted it ten days later. The replacement was three lines of Prettier config. A short note on the wrong-layer trap, the four-questions test, and why a mature agent-ready repo isn't the one with the most artifacts in it.
- technical-notes·3 min read
The first real Alembic revision: a column, a backfill, and the parts autogenerate can't do
Last post set up Alembic in clipdex. This one cashes the bet: add a duration_ms column to processed_videos, backfill from the existing aggregation, and switch the /episodes endpoint to read it. Three commits. The parts autogenerate gets right, the parts it doesn't, and why the backfill is the line where raw SQL would have started to hurt.
