Welcome to Field Notes

Most consulting blogs are sales brochures dressed up as thought leadership. The post you're reading right now exists because I think there's a better use for this space.

What this blog is for

Field Notes is the working surface for the patterns I keep running into. After twenty years leading product teams and more than a decade diagnosing them from the outside, the same problems show up over and over – in different costumes, in different industries, but with the same underlying shape. A team that can't ship. A leader who can't see the system they're inside. A pile of documents nobody can keep up with.

I write about those patterns here for two reasons. First, because writing forces me to be honest about what I actually believe – the half-formed intuitions I lean on with clients have to survive contact with a published page. Second, because the people I most want to work with are quietly looking for a perspective like this, and a blog is how they find one.

Who it's for

Three audiences:

• Product leaders facing a delivery problem they can't see the cause of, or a strategy debate that won't end. These posts will sit in the Diagnostic Sprint and Strategy Sprint categories.
• Solo and boutique advisory firms trying to operate a sharper practice – intake, deliverables, follow-up, the whole back office of a firm that bills by the hour. That's the Consulting Operations category.
• Knowledge workers and operators who want to understand where AI is genuinely useful in document-heavy work, and where the hype outpaces the substance. That's Knowledge & AI, and it's adjacent to a service I'm building called Fieldway Intelligence Services.

If you're in any of those buckets, you're in the right place.

What to expect

Concrete writing. Specific examples. Numbers when I have them. I won't post if I don't have something to say, and I won't pad a thin idea to hit a length target. The cadence will be irregular and the posts will vary in length – some will be 600 words on a single observation, others will be longer essays that work through a case in detail.

If you'd rather not check back, subscribe to the newsletter and I'll send the next one when it's ready.

Why "Field Notes"

Because that's what they are. The work happens in the field, with clients, on whiteboards, in their org charts and their inboxes. What gets written here are the notes I take afterward – what I noticed, what surprised me, what I'd do differently. They're not finished theories. They're the working drafts of a perspective that gets sharper every time I write one down.

Welcome aboard.