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My father-in-law, Bob Dunwoody, had a chair at his ski house that fooled everyone.It looked like a chair. A good one, the kind of quietly handsome piece that belonged in a room with big windows and a fire going. You'd walk past it a dozen times and never think twice. Then someone would sink into it, find a hidden control, and the thing would come alive. Not a sad little buzz. A full, deep tissue massage that worked your back like it had opinions about your posture.That chair

The problem with AI at work is not just bad outputs. It's that too many organizations now require a performance of belief. Not a result. Not proof. Belief. The willingness to say, out loud, in the right meeting, that AI is transforming your work — whether or not it actually is. And once an organization starts rewarding that performance, it stops being able to hear the one sentence it needs most: this is not working. The coordination problem nobody wants to name Cory Doctorow,

Most leaders think employee experience is a state. Good or bad. Healthy or toxic. A number on an engagement survey that either clears the bar or doesn't. That's the wrong model. Employee experience is not a state. It's a slope. It drifts. Slowly, quietly, and mostly out of view — until one day the work is worse, the people are tired, and nobody can point to the moment it went sideways. There wasn't a moment. There was a slide. And the customer meets the bottom of that slide l

In the last post, I argued that "AI slop" is a signal, not just an insult. I laid out three patterns for how people experience AI inside a product or content stream: Invisible Assistance, Visible Augmentation, and Slop. And I promised to come back and expand them. Here's the twist I saved for this one. When people talk about these patterns, they picture customers. The user staring at the feed. The reader reaching for the report button. The audience that can smell a machine-wr

LinkedIn just added a "Seems like AI slop" button. Think about what that admission actually contains. A platform built on professional self-presentation, owned by Microsoft, deeply invested in the AI moment, looked at its own feed and decided it needed a formal mechanism for users to say this feels fake. Its chief product officer said the company blocks hundreds of thousands of automated slop comments a day and has stopped billions of automation attempts in a matter of months

When people reach out to talk about my dissertation, they rarely want to talk about the whole thing. Fair enough. They usually want to talk about one line: your product or service experience is often just an outward expression of your employee experience. I have never formally named that idea, mostly because I did not want to brand it unless I had a name good enough to deserve it. But for now, this will do: The Inside-Out Employee Experience Principle. The idea is simple. If

I saw The Odyssey yesterday. It's a great movie — the kind that reminds you why people still leave the house to sit in the dark with strangers. Nolan shot the whole thing on IMAX film, and it shows. Go see it. But this isn't a film review. It's about something Nolan said afterward that I haven't been able to shake. Asked whether AI might be a Trojan horse — a gift you welcome in, only to watch it turn into something darker — he laughed and said, "AI is a Trojan horse that eve

When I was a student at Creighton, I got to see Warren Buffett speak in person a handful of times. He never dressed up his message. Year after year, he came back to the same warning: when corporations chase quarterly profits above everything else, the quality of their products and services suffers. That idea stuck with me. Not because it was clever, but because it was so obviously true and so widely ignored. Most companies don't invest in their infrastructure until something

This morning I found the cherry tree stripped bare on one side. Deer, sometime overnight, working through the tender new growth with the calm efficiency of animals who know you're asleep. I've gardened in Colorado long enough to expect this. You plant, you protect, you plan — and then reality wanders in on four legs and reminds you who's actually in charge. I've been at this for years now, gardening through drought that keeps getting worse. The Colorado River is running low,

Let's get one thing out of the way. AI is real. It is useful. It is not going anywhere. You can watch it draft, summarize, classify, and write code at a pace that would have looked like science fiction a few years ago. Teams move faster with it. Researchers cover more ground. Support tickets get triaged before a human ever opens them. Anyone telling you the technology is fake or a passing fad is selling their own kind of hype. So this is not a "kill your AI budget" essay. The

On June 22, 2026, Keir Starmer stood outside Downing Street and resigned as the shortest-serving Labour prime minister in history. Less than two years earlier, he had won a landslide. The story of what happened in between is, at its heart, a story about drift. And it is a story every product manager should study, because it is the same mistake teams make in software every single day. The Setup Starmer won big in 2024 by being an alternative to fourteen years of Conservative c

There's a rule so old and so obvious in my field that we sometimes forget to say it out loud. It's number one on Jakob Nielsen's list of usability heuristics, and it's been sitting at the top since before half the people building AI today could ride a bike. It's called visibility of system status, and it boils down to a single, almost parental idea: tell people what's going on. That's it. When something is loading, show a spinner. When a file saves, say "saved." When the elev

Let me start with a confession that probably won't surprise you by now: I keep finding the Dunning-Kruger Dark Age everywhere I look. It's like learning a new word and then hearing it six times before lunch. Once you name a pattern, it refuses to stay quiet. But I genuinely did not expect the cleanest example of it to be the entire AI industry — the very people building the future, the ones who keep telling us they're the smartest folks in any room they walk into. So here's t

I should warn you up front: I am a Disney Adult, and I am not the least bit sorry about it. If you grew up like me, you understand. I was raised by a single mom who worked herself to the bone, and every couple of years she scraped together enough to take me to Disneyland. When the real world got too heavy — and it got heavy a lot — we'd duck into a dark theater and let a Disney movie carry us somewhere kinder for ninety minutes. That wasn't escapism for us. It was oxygen. So

I coined this phrase back in 2016, half as a joke and half as a coping mechanism. I needed a name for the strange feeling that we'd collectively wandered off the map of shared reality. The joke didn't age well. The pattern did. So let's give it a proper home in the Product Patterns taxonomy, because once you see it, you can't unsee it — and your discovery process will never feel the same. What the Dunning-Kruger Dark Age Actually Is You already know the Dunning-Kruger effect:

Most product teams don't realize they're in trouble until the dashboard is already on fire. It's a pattern as familiar as it is frustrating — a metric tanks, someone calls it a "learning moment," and the team scrambles to look busy while the real problems quietly compound. The relationship between Product Management (PM) and User Experience (UX) is a working partnership — and like any partnership worth having, it requires constant effort, mutual understanding, and a shared de