Field notes
Notes on product, operations and building systems that keep working as they grow.
The next users of our products may not be human
Less than four years after ChatGPT, product builders need to design for AI agents as users, and for a generation growing up with AI.
Trust is a designed feature, not a tone of voice
In gold, in charity, in legal filings, the trust that held was the kind built into an artefact someone could check.
Productise tacit knowledge, or stay a bottleneck
CompanyHouse taught me that the hard part is never the software — it is getting the expert's exceptions out of their head.
An operating system beats a strategy deck
Shalize did not grow because of a strategy. It grew because every step of the work had one owner, one definition and one place to live.
Say what did not work
A portfolio without failures cannot be calibrated. Here is what broke in mine, and what each break taught me.
The client is not an external order-giver
Consulting collapses when the client becomes someone you deliver to instead of someone you think with — here is what that cost me, and what it bought.
Numbers must survive being asked about
Every figure I publish has to hold up when someone asks where it came from — and most of mine were never audited.