Field notes
Notes on product, operations and building systems that keep working as they grow.
Trust is a designed feature, not a tone of voice
In gold, in charity, in legal filings, the trust that held was the kind built into an artefact someone could check.
Productise tacit knowledge, or stay a bottleneck
CompanyHouse taught me that the hard part is never the software — it is getting the expert's exceptions out of their head.
An operating system beats a strategy deck
Shalize did not grow because of a strategy. It grew because every step of the work had one owner, one definition and one place to live.
Say what did not work
A portfolio without failures cannot be calibrated. Here is what broke in mine, and what each break taught me.
The client is not an external order-giver
Consulting collapses when the client becomes someone you deliver to instead of someone you think with — here is what that cost me, and what it bought.
Numbers must survive being asked about
Every figure I publish has to hold up when someone asks where it came from — and most of mine were never audited.