I’ve learned the most in product work from being wrong about ideas I liked.
Once, a designer hand-built a feature I wanted to automate, and the customers’ reactions changed what we built.
I've spent fifteen years in product management. I write here about calls like that one: what happened, what I made of it, and what I'm still unsure about. Alongside my full-time product work, I build Phronesis.
Automatic styling removed the work and the choices.
Editing tools made the work easier. Customers kept the choices.
The designer's version was better. Customers still wanted the controls.
Before building automatic storefront styling, we had a designer do it by hand for a few customers. The result was better than our software could have produced, and customers still wanted to change it.
Read the essayEvery integration looked different on the roadmap
New customers kept needing integrations we didn't have, and each one pulled engineers off planned work. The way out started in Postman, where every integration turned out to be the same four steps.
Read the essayPhronesis
A local workspace that carries decisions, sources, and context from one AI session to the next. It captures what changed after the work and brings the relevant decisions back before your AI answers. You approve what becomes current, and everything stays in plain Markdown on your own disk.
Works with Claude Code and Codex.
Explore PhronesisI'm a product leader in Phoenix, currently working on AI and platform capabilities for small-business software. Before that, I led product in marketing technology, business communications, and property-management software. Phronesis is a tool I built for myself to get the most out of Claude Code and Codex for knowledge work and coding.
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