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Champions, Not Mandates: How to Actually Drive AI Adoption
You can’t memo or force your way to AI adoption. I’ve written before (Strategy Isn’t Strategy Unless Repeated) about why communication alone doesn’t change behavior. Adoption is a behavior change problem. You need mechanisms of change, not just announcements. Two that have worked well for me for AI adoption specifically are: hackathons and local champions.…
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Strategy Isn’t Strategy Unless Repeated
Here’s some math that makes this obvious once you see it: you spend dozens, maybe hundreds of hours developing a strategy. You think through the problems, the options, the trade-offs, the execution paths. You live with it. You sleep on it. You iterate on it. You pressure-test it with other senior execs and your leadership…
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Treat Your Organization Like a Distributed System
Engineering leaders spend years learning to build fault-tolerant systems. We design for failure. We instrument everything. We think carefully about what happens when a node goes down, when traffic spikes, when dependencies become unreliable. Then we walk into a meeting about team structure and don’t apply those same lessons. The highest-leverage work for most engineering…
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Building Software Was Never the Hard Part
Building software is easier than ever. The AI tools work well enough really well. The low-code/no-code platforms work well enough really well. The vibe coding works well enough really well. That marketing director who shipped an internal tool over the weekend? They’re not wrong to feel empowered. They actually built something, it actually runs, and…
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People Always Have an Opinion When They See a Wireframe
Getting good feedback is one of the hardest parts of product work. You send a doc. You ask for thoughts and it’s usually met with silence or “Looks good to me.” You follow up for more and maybe one person responds or you get, “move the button in the flow to the top right”. Everyone…
