All Posts
Essays on product leadership, promotion, influence and interviewing.
Forward deployed engineers & product: why they exist and how to prepare for their interviews
What these roles are, why AI companies are hiring for them, what makes them hard, and how to prepare for each part of the interview.
How to Set Goals That Are Actually Ambitious (Not Just Optimistic)
SMART goals and OKRs are frameworks for documenting a target, not for working out what it should be. A diagnostic for setting one that is ambitious and anchored in how your surface actually moves.
If your scope and title are misaligned - That is your problem to solve.
The most common career stall I see in senior leaders has nothing to do with performance. It has to do with visibility.
AI fluency is a tactic. Judgment is the strategy.
Most leaders are sprinting to close the AI knowledge gap. That is the wrong race: the ones who separate themselves use AI to ask better strategic questions.
Is it a skills problem or is it (lack of) trust and accountability?
When a team is slow, the instinct is to train them, tool them up, or reorganize them. All three are usually wrong.
Circles of influence - a framework for energy management
"I can't stand incompetent people." That is what a brilliant MAANG client told me — and a framework for deciding where your energy is worth spending.
When doing more stops working
What made you exceptional at your current level can quietly become what holds you back at the next one.
Diagnosing resistance before you persuade
"I have the data. I have the benchmarks. I don't understand why they won't move." When a case is made and the answer is still no, more evidence is the wrong move.