I’m a product manager that sees businesses as fascinating rubric cubes to solve.

To create a great business you must work through a mind boggling amount of permutations of vision, strategy and execution to get it right. I love diving into the weeds of those permutations and finding the right one to go to market with. But I always find myself abstracting away from the doing and thinking through the process...

🤔 How I Think

• Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held

• Balancing Systems Thinking & First Principles

• What got us here won’t get us there.

• There's things that have the right to be complicated

• See both sides of the argument, and make your best effort to choose a side.

• Businesses are the hardest game to win

🛠️ Ways of Working

• Always be experimenting

• Outcome is more important that sticking to a process

• Focus on answering the right question, even if that means spending less time on answering - Principals over Frameworks

• Delivering the wrong feature faster still delivers no value.

• Better than best in class is necessary for core differentiation

🤼 Culture

• If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

• There is a false dichotomy between the culture of learning and a culture of results

• Access to knowledge isn’t nearly as difficult as the desire to learn

• Take two managers. Manager A is 100% confident about their decision — just because. Manager B is 70% confident and explains why they’re at 70% and what they’re unsure about. Who do you believe

Outcome - Properly defined, and makes sense for the vision of the company

Bonding - Seeing how people work, and working through the trenches together to achieve a common goal

Learnings - Can be done through success and failure. Ability to reflect does not necessarily result in learnings.

I like to communicate in writing - as it's concrete and doesn't provide leeway for fast words to replace coherent thoughts.

I like to abstract into visual doodles - that might make sense to me (because of internal monologues) but not make sense to people who see it without explanation.

Direct - For 90% of my interactions, I like to stay objective and provide feedback and thoughts which are rationale in nature.

Pushing the envelope into dangerous rabbit holes - I sometimes feel the need to understand nuances even if they don't seem relevant. It's usually because I'm trying to connect my own internal thoughts and may seem tedious and off-topic.

I like to jump in my conversations - It's not necessarily because I've lost interest in the previous conversation, but rather I have come to a conclusion that has led me to the next topic. I often forget people can't read my thoughts and may lose people when I do this. Please stop me if something stops making sense.

I like to skip small talk - It's not that I don't want to know you, it's just that when I'm focused on something in particular, other things can seem like less of a priority. My sense of camaraderie is not correlated with small talk, but rather my ability to trust your intuition and banter through work.

I need the bigger picture - Because I like to solve undefined problems, if I'm given discrete tasks without the bigger picture, I have a tendency to assume the broader picture and solve for the discrete tasks with those assumptions in mind - leading to misalignment and potential re-work.

I work much better in the 80/20 space. - Working through unknowns give me energy, filling in the blanks takes away energy.

I don't have a sense of work/life balance - if my brain is on, I might message you during off-work hours. (I need to better respect other people's work/life balance).

Gaining my trust

• Working in the trenches together.

• Presenting your ideas & your thinking without filters

Losing my trust

• A clear misalignment between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge

• Afraid of asking dumb questions

• Clear violation of transparency (taking advantage of opaqueness)

• Ideating on how things can be better

• Providing refinement in thinking

• Asking questions that generate further discussion

• Abstracting away from the detail and understanding the broader processes, mindsets and constraints that can suppress potential step-change.

• Interest wains over time and follow through capability -

  Once I get uninterested, my brain goes onto autopilot mode and wonders towards unsolved, more interesting problems.

• Providing my rationale as definitive, even when they're not -

• I have strong beliefs on non-verified assumptions. It’s necessary to build towards a bigger picture. This does not mean I don’t want to hear evidence to the contrary.