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Working Models
Practical thinking tools built to be used, not framed on a wall. Battle-tested approaches you can borrow, bend, and break to fit your own mess.
The Performance of "Belief"
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,
Employee Experience Doesn't Break. It Drifts.
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
Your Employees Meet the Slop First
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
When Your Audience Names the Problem, That's the Signal
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
The Glass Horse: What Nolan Gets Right About AI That Your Company Keeps Missing
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
The AI Dark Age: How the Industry That's Reshaping the World Can't Seem to Read the Room
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
Even Disney Can Fall Into the Dark Age
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
Is Your Product Team Drifting? Health-Driven Operating Model (HDOM)
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
AI & Workflow Systems
When Is a Mandate Actually a Mandate?
What two elections, two years apart, reveal about the difference between winning and being authorized In The Mandate Trap, I argued that product leaders were absorbing a political story as market evidence. After 2024, the dominant narrative said the country had spoken with one voice, confidence was back, and leaders had broad permission to act. I said the numbers didn't support that story, and that product teams building for the customer the story implied would drift away fro
HR Knowledge Graph: How to Build a Smarter, AI-Powered HR Bot
Most HR teams already have plenty of data. Workday holds employee records. ADP runs payroll. A benefits platform tracks enrollment. A case management tool logs every question. The problem is that these systems rarely talk to each other. So the most important questions, like why a candidate hesitates on an offer or why new hires flood the support line every January, go unanswered. An HR knowledge graph solves that problem. It connects people, journey stages, systems, and outco
The Mandate Trap
How product leaders mistake political narrative and AI optimism for market signal Product organizations rarely fail all at once. They drift. Drift often starts with a story that is loud, confident, and repeated often enough to feel like fact. Someone in leadership says the market has turned. Someone else agrees. A roadmap review starts treating that idea as settled. Within a quarter, teams are building for a customer who exists mostly in the narrative. Narrative and signal ar
Product Craft & Patterns
When Is a Mandate Actually a Mandate?
What two elections, two years apart, reveal about the difference between winning and being authorized In The Mandate Trap, I argued that product leaders were absorbing a political story as market evidence. After 2024, the dominant narrative said the country had spoken with one voice, confidence was back, and leaders had broad permission to act. I said the numbers didn't support that story, and that product teams building for the customer the story implied would drift away fro
1 day ago9 min read
HR Knowledge Graph: How to Build a Smarter, AI-Powered HR Bot
Most HR teams already have plenty of data. Workday holds employee records. ADP runs payroll. A benefits platform tracks enrollment. A case management tool logs every question. The problem is that these systems rarely talk to each other. So the most important questions, like why a candidate hesitates on an offer or why new hires flood the support line every January, go unanswered. An HR knowledge graph solves that problem. It connects people, journey stages, systems, and outco
1 day ago8 min read
Organizational Systems
When Is a Mandate Actually a Mandate?
What two elections, two years apart, reveal about the difference between winning and being authorized In The Mandate Trap, I argued that product leaders were absorbing a political story as market evidence. After 2024, the dominant narrative said the country had spoken with one voice, confidence was back, and leaders had broad permission to act. I said the numbers didn't support that story, and that product teams building for the customer the story implied would drift away fro
HR Knowledge Graph: How to Build a Smarter, AI-Powered HR Bot
Most HR teams already have plenty of data. Workday holds employee records. ADP runs payroll. A benefits platform tracks enrollment. A case management tool logs every question. The problem is that these systems rarely talk to each other. So the most important questions, like why a candidate hesitates on an offer or why new hires flood the support line every January, go unanswered. An HR knowledge graph solves that problem. It connects people, journey stages, systems, and outco
The Mandate Trap
How product leaders mistake political narrative and AI optimism for market signal Product organizations rarely fail all at once. They drift. Drift often starts with a story that is loud, confident, and repeated often enough to feel like fact. Someone in leadership says the market has turned. Someone else agrees. A roadmap review starts treating that idea as settled. Within a quarter, teams are building for a customer who exists mostly in the narrative. Narrative and signal ar
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