Systems Thinking

A recent episode of Latent Space with Joon Sung Park, co-founder of Simile AI, caused a strange flashback to my student days in industrial engineering. Long before anyone talked about generative AI, we learned to use a piece of software called Arena to build probabilistic simulations of airports, supermarkets, factories, and other complex systems. The basic idea was simple and surprisingly powerful. Instead of changing the real system, you built a simplified version of it on a computer. Customers arrived according to some probability distribution. A cashier took a variable amount of time to serve them. Queues formed, resources became occupied and available again. You could add another checkout lane, change the staffing level, or rearrange a production line, run the simulation thousands of times, and see what happened before spending money in the real world. ...

When an artificial intelligence system gives us a wrong answer, almost everyone reaches for the same explanation, which is that the system never learned the thing we asked about. The information was missing from its training, and so the remedy is to supply more of it, whether that means more data, a larger model, or another round of training on our own internal documents. This explanation has become so common that most organizations no longer treat it as an assumption, and they build their budgets and their improvement plans around it. ...

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. ...

When Private Equity Optimizes the Wrong Thing Over the past years, a troubling pattern has become increasingly visible in Israeli tech. Companies founded and grown in Israel, often on the back of exceptional ingenuity, speed, and informal problem solving, are acquired by private equity firms and then gradually or abruptly stripped of their Israeli core. Functions are relocated, investment is reduced, leadership is replaced, and the original teams are slowly starved or shut down. ...

Early in my career, coming from industrial engineering, I learned a simple rule that has shaped the way I think about software development ever since. Software may look abstract, creative, fluid. But underneath, it behaves like a production system. The best articulation of this idea appears in The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, one of the most influential books I have ever read. In production, every system revolves around three outputs you can influence: ...

The Answer Is Still Cookies A few days ago, I saw a Cookie Monster quote that made me stop: “Me don’t know da question, but me know da answer is cookies.” It is funny. It is childish. And it is exactly how companies behave when they insist their problems are special. Every company believes it is fundamentally different. Different industry. Different technology. Different customers. Different speed. Therefore, their problems must be new, unprecedented, uniquely complex. ...