Field Notes
Practical writing for product leaders and boutique advisors – on deciding what to build, answering the hard questions, and running a sharper practice.
Continuous Discovery Has an Infrastructure Problem, Not a Willpower Problem
Most teams fail at continuous discovery, but not from lack of discipline. It's missing infrastructure – and that's a fixable problem.
Diligence Is Getting Longer, Not Deeper
M&A due diligence has stretched from four months to nearly seven. Longer hasn't meant deeper – and that gap is where deals quietly break.
The AI Rule You Built For Just Got Repealed
The AI rules firms spent two years preparing for are now being repealed and pre-empted. Compliance built on a moving target needs a new approach.
Who Becomes Senior When AI Does All the Junior Work?
AI is automating the junior work that used to turn people into seniors. So who becomes senior once the training ground is gone?
Your Prioritization Framework Is Theater
Leadership overrides the prioritization framework most of the time. The score was never the decision – the conversation is.
The Diligence Gap: Why Nearly Half of Dead Deals Now Die in the Data Room
What kills M&A deals has shifted from financing to what buyers find in the data room – and earnings quality is the fastest-rising killer.
Thirty Years of Agile and Software Success Is Still Stuck at 31%
After decades of Agile, cloud, and better tools, software still succeeds about 31% of the time. The bottleneck was never the tooling.
Your Team Doesn't Trust You, and the Data Says You Can't See It
Trust in leadership is at multi-year lows, worst in tech – and the leaders who own it are the last to see it. The cost isn't who quits.
The Verification Gap: Your Developers Don't Trust the Code They're Shipping
Developers don't trust AI-generated code – and ship it anyway. The verification gap is a management problem, not a model problem.