Career

There is a pattern in senior resumes and LinkedIn profiles that makes me more uncomfortable every year. Someone “grew revenue by 38%.” Someone else “reduced costs by $4.2M.” Another “increased engineering productivity by 60%.” Sometimes I know the work behind these lines well enough to know that the link between the person and the number was much weaker than the sentence suggests. It is tempting to call this a problem of dishonest people. My view is that it is worse than that. I believe we built a market that rewards the performance and punishes the truth. In my experience, the candidate who writes “grew revenue by 38%” is more likely to get the interview than the one who honestly describes a shared effort. When the reward for exaggeration is high and the chance of being checked is low, I do not see exaggeration as a personal failure. I see it as the rational response to the system we built. ...

I walked past Can’t Hurt Me in stores for years. David Goggins on the cover, staring at me. I never picked it up. I was done with self-help. Done with theories about how to live. Done with monks on mountaintops and founders who wake up at 5am and need you to know about it. Then a few months ago I bought it. I still don’t know why. Something about it got me that time. ...

A Small Number, a Real Moment CV Match has been out in the world for a few months now. I almost didn’t notice when it crossed 100 installations. That number, by itself, is not impressive. It is small. Almost trivial. What made me stop was not the number, but the realization that this thing actually existed in the hands of people I did not know. Real users, not personas. Real decisions, not demos. ...

The Full Stack PM I have always believed in the idea of the full stack product manager. Not because one person should do everyone’s job, but because product work does not respect org charts. Products fail and succeed in the gaps between roles, and when those gaps exist, someone has to step in and own them. Many organizations like clear distinctions: technical PMs, product owners, delivery PMs, growth PMs. On paper, it looks clean. In practice, it often creates waste. Handoffs. Waiting. Endless alignment meetings. Everyone does their part, but nobody owns the outcome. ...