Journal

Notes on product, UX, and shipping work that scales.

A Roadmap Is a List of Bets: I taught founders how to build a product roadmap at McGill in 2017. The approach still holds. AI changed everything around it. (2026-06-30)
The future of developers when AI writes the first draft (2026): AI coding agents write the first draft. The developer role shifts to specs, diff review, and judgment. Field notes from shipping 1Health on agents. (2026-06-12)
Great UX Gets Out of the Way: Good UX helps people finish the job they came to do: fewer choices, clearer defaults, and a path that does not ask them to learn your company first. (2025-06-10)
Buy a boring business: SMB acquisitions vs starting from zero: SMB acquisitions vs starting a company: buy a boring business ($500k–$5M), due diligence, franchise vs acquisition, and a 100-day plan after close. (2025-02-06)
What I Learned about Branding at Founder Institute: Founder Institute Fall 2024 surprised me: branding was about naming who you're for and what changes for them, before anyone opened Figma. (2024-11-19)
The Future of User Interfaces: GUI, CUI, and Beyond: Graphical interfaces remain central, and chat adds a useful layer. The future is picking the right interface for each job: maps, dashboards, or conversation. (2024-07-17)
AI Hardware Lessons from Humane and Rabbit: Humane's Ai Pin and Rabbit's R1 pointed at post-phone computing. Their launch showed that hardware rewards finished daily jobs and reliability, built on a story the product can carry past day one. (2024-06-01)