About

Working-class, Seven Sisters-educated autodidact. I have the sensibilities of an artist with the calculated skepticism and rigor of a scientist. I tend to think most effectively when walking, slow running, or time alone in the redwoods with a sketchbook.

A short list of my biases:

Coffee should be roasted dark and never made weak.
Most things worth cooking can be cooked in a cast iron pan.
The reason for being is art and belonging.
Money is velocity towards a goal and not the goal itself.
Good design IS good business.
A good business is that which doesn’t requires exploiting the attention of the customer or the will of the workers or lying to the public or stakeholders.
In 2000 I proclaimed to the {future} president of Commission Junction, “Besides shopping, the internet will only ever be useful for two things: cats and porn.” This is still the case.
VR is a greater force for good than the internet ever was.
The perfect education for well-rounded, compassionate humans is a liberal arts education.
Excellent personal branding and dab hand at social media are not equivalent to depth, judgement, experience and expertise.
People who label themselves “experts” when others don’t typically aren’t.
Getting seniority at work is is not “I had this job for two whole years!” It is “I fucked up a real big thing and I learned how to never do that again and all of the ways to avoid it in the future and it made me better at this job.”
Raw & wild intellectual horsepower with heaps of unorthodox thinking over a tony college degree any day of the week.
The things that make a great product manager are the same things that make a great human: practice, getting it really wrong and wanting to crawl into a hole and hide for life then coming out and practicing some more with humility and grace for yourself and others.
If you want to be a really great product manager don’t work at {insert Tech Giant here}. Work at as many places as possible doing as many things as possible for as long as possible – diversity and range are the key- in those big places you are forced to focus on maybe one ridiculous KPI such as let’s get a million people to a toggle this one radio button. Ugh! It’s boring and you only learn how they want YOU think and do product.
Working with bad teams and reckless companies with absolutely batshit founders is the only way to learn how to operate in almost any environment.
Has anyone made great contributions to their discipline done it while watching Netflix, scrolling through IG and talking on the phone? I doubt it.
True intelligence understands that AI isn’t.
There are no hacks for productivity unless you call sitting down and getting shit done “a hack.”
If you are a d-bag and an asshole professionally, you are probably a d-bag and an asshole IRL.