Nobody Defined Done

What Building GitLab's Customer Usage Predictions Taught Me About Outcome-First Deployments I have a theory. I think most deployments fail not because of bad technology but because nobody defined "done" before the work started. It really is a litany of things (bad fit customer, loss of exec sponsor, competitor undercut, product issues, etc.), but IContinue reading "Nobody Defined Done"

I Got Eight Weeks of Analysis Done in an Afternoon.

A Practitioner's Guide to VSM and VSA in Knowledge Work Eleven months after launching a new expense approval system, I discovered that Stage 2 — the gap between Finance approval and Payables processing — was eating more than half of total cycle time. The bottleneck wasn't the approval chain. It was the queue after approval.Continue reading "I Got Eight Weeks of Analysis Done in an Afternoon."

Building a Finance Approval System From Scratch

We Built a System So We Wouldn’t Fly Blind Anymore. In late 2023, we identified a problem with how our finance team processed expense reimbursements, cash advances, and petty cash requests. The process worked... most of the time. But it was tenuous. Approvals happened in email, which meant requests sometimes got lost, went to theContinue reading "Building a Finance Approval System From Scratch"

AI Rewards Thinkers and Replaces The Rest

The more time I spend with AI, the more impressed I become. Recently, it helped me write a preliminary report for an economic impact study and map several internal workflows to identify service level gaps. Also, I used AI to analyze a systemic drinking water shortage problem where I live in West Africa. I hadContinue reading "AI Rewards Thinkers and Replaces The Rest"

Don’t out think AI. Out human AI.

Ironically, an AI generated image to prove the point: where can we add value? As AI capabilities rapidly close the gap on what only humans could do, I leaned on these insights from Toni Cowan-Brown and Benedict Evans on *Another Podcast* to guide my thinking. Give it a listen: AI and SaaS. "I hadn't thought ofContinue reading "Don’t out think AI. Out human AI."