5 min read
Dysfunction From the Ground Up
What dysfunction feels like from the ground floor — a story about being told off for helping people
Blog
Browse all posts by topic, or start with a learning pathway.
Showing all 18 posts
10 min read
Breaking the Spiral: Rebuilding a Team From 54% Attrition
How I helped turn around a team with 54% attrition and -37% eNPS by rebuilding connections, creating ownership through participatory OKRs, and reversing a negative spiral into positive momentum.
9 min read
From 'Always Be Quitting' to 'Always Be Teaching'
Moving beyond individual documentation practices to building team-wide knowledge ownership and teaching culture
10 min read
The £10M Production Facility That Proved We Could Compete
Leading a £10M capital investment to build automated PPE manufacturing during COVID—proving UK efficiency could compete with Far East costs, then watching the government offshore it anyway.
14 min read
When AI Needs Course Correction: Recognising Flailing vs. Working
Five dependency upgrades taught me the difference between AI iterating normally and AI guessing wildly. Knowing when to intervene makes all the difference.
12 min read
Le Grand Plan: Replacing the Ship While Sailing It
How we spent three years systematically replacing our technical architecture whilst delivering continuous business value - not in a big-bang replatforming, but plank by plank, always sailing, always improving.
16 min read
Care Personally, Challenge Directly: Learning Radical Candor the Hard Way
A 2x2 grid that explains why some working relationships work and others don't. Care personally and challenge directly - but most of us drift between all four quadrants depending on context and pressure.
8 min read
From Exploratory Chat to Live Deployment: 90 Minutes
The two modes in practice - 90 minutes from exploratory thinking to live deployment, pushing into unfamiliar territory with API keys and GitHub Secrets.
8 min read
Deploying to Production: What 16 Hours and a Sickness Bug Taught Me
From local development to production in a day - learning Azure, DNS, and CI/CD while quarantined to my study with a sickness bug.
8 min read
Two Modes: How I Actually Work With AI
Exploratory thinking partner versus execution tool - the two distinct ways I've learned to work with AI, and when each mode actually works.
8 min read
What They Don't Tell You About Building With AI
Cardboard muffins, missing babies, and reward hacking - the predictable problems you'll hit when building with AI tools.
12 min read
From Chatbot Frustration to Building Production Tools
From hating chatbots to building production tools with AI - what changed wasn't just the technology, it was understanding when to build jigs.
7 min read
Purple Cows and Platform Changes: How Ideas Spread When Everything Changes at Once
Seth Godin's Purple Cow isn't about marketing products - it's about getting people to adopt new systems. Finding the early adopters, making things remarkable (or at least easiest), and catching workarounds before they become normal practice.
6 min read
Making Work Visible - The Five Thieves of Time
Why work takes longer than it should - the five thieves that steal our capacity without us realising it.
5 min read
Bridging the Gap: Learning Product Ownership
Who decides what to build? Who says no? Who owns the trade-offs? Learning about product ownership through projects that worked and projects that didn't.
5 min read
When You Can't Iterate
Sometimes you need to plan everything upfront. Sometimes experimentation is dangerous. Sometimes sequential delivery is the only sensible option.
6 min read
Minimum Viable Product - Learning Over Building
MVP isn't about building a bad version - it's about learning what matters first. From paper forms to real-time alerts in three iterations.
5 min read
Learning Agile on Planes and Shop Floors
From plane journeys drowning in jargon to building dispatch systems on shop floors - my ongoing attempt to understand what agile actually means.