An authored practice.
Over twenty years of defining, designing, and delivering software solutions distilled into a practice for helping you bring your dreams into the world.
“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.”
The pure stuff.
Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month, used the term thought-stuff to describe what product managers, designers, and engineers actually work with: the stuff of thought, shaped into reality. That sentence has been central to my life's practice. For more than twenty years I have moved back and forth across the liminal space between an idea and the thing the idea becomes, as a programmer, an architect, a founder, and the person responsible for whether teams ship.
Armed with a passion for the art of software development, I have spent the last two decades building and leading teams to create meaningful digital experiences. Most of my experience was hard won as a boutique software consultant working with a diverse range of brands: Disney, Turner, Mercedes, Honda, Verizon, McKesson, HBO, the NBA, Riot Games, and Mattel, among others. These experiences taught me how to drive hard on defining, designing, and delivering real, usable products in diverse contexts and optimizing for delivering value via constraints. I've led myriad types of engagements, from small team projects to large-scale initiatives, and I have built and run small and large organizations, including standing up a seventy-engineer studio in Beijing. Through all of this, I learned that culture, hiring, and method are the product. At Disney, I led international engineering teams responsible for the streaming experience of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, shipping across Living Room and Web apps for tens of millions of users worldwide. I also led an R&D function exploring the next generation of user experience: AI-assisted authoring, real-time interaction, personalization, multimodal interfaces, spatial and embodied computing, and human-machine co-creation. Thought-Stuff is my full attention now.
This endeavor, Thought-Stuff, is the culmination of my work. The mission is to help ambitious people get their hopes and dreams, pure thought-stuff, into the world. Thought-Stuff is a product, a system, a company, a story, a working method. I think of the role as architect of adjacent possibles, someone who can see the next move that is actually within reach, and shape it so it lands. The Studio is how the work pays its rent. The Lab is how the thinking stays honest in public. The Guild is the company I want to keep while doing it. I take engagements one at a time, write under my own name, and answer my own mail.
Six lines.
Thought made operational.
The work starts as language, instinct, and possibility. It has to end as a decision, a system, a product, or a next move.
Value under constraint.
Real products are made inside limits: time, money, people, politics, attention. Constraints are not the enemy of value. They are how value gets shaped.
Culture is part of the product.
Teams ship the culture they practice. Hiring, method, standards, and trust are not backstage concerns. They are the machinery of delivery.
Find the adjacent possible.
The useful move is rarely the biggest dream or the safest compromise. It is the next real thing within reach that changes what becomes possible after it.
Tell the truth early.
If the fit is not real, the plan is too vague, or the story does not hold, say so while there is still time to make it useful.
Make it editable.
A strategy, a system, a company, a practice: anything alive needs to be revised. Build the artifact so the next version can find you.
A short list.
I write here. I take on a small number of engagements through the Studio. I host monthly salons. I'm building a small Guild for serious peers. For everything else, speaking, writing, collaboration, friendly questions, write me. I read everything.