Notebook

Small learnings to put to work. Brief notes, useful questions, and practical snippets from my writing on AI, design systems, and product leadership.

Looking for a deeper argument? The full essays live in Articles.

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Drafting stays inside a preparation boundary. An explicit permission checkpoint separates preparation from action, with evidence and recovery responsibilities defined.

Write a delegation contract

Before an agent acts, make its authority, limits, and recovery path explicit.

AI product1 min read

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Sources enter retrieval, but evidence must be checked for relevance and freshness before it can support a user decision.

Add five awkward questions to an eval

A small retrieval test should include questions the system cannot neatly answer.

Evaluation1 min read

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A sketch raises a question, a product frame defines constraints, code exposes real states, and shared review turns the prototype into a decision.

Ask for the design-system receipt

Check what a generated interface actually uses before trusting its resemblance to the design system.

Design systems1 min read

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Four named responsibilities form a decision handoff: frame the outcome, evaluate evidence, authorize release, and operate with a recovery owner.

Give a handoff an owner

A document sent is not the same as responsibility transferred.

Product leadership1 min read

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Evidence and authority meet at the reviewer. The reviewer can approve, correct, or escalate instead of merely accepting an automated answer.

Record why an AI answer was overridden

The reason for a correction is more useful than a count of corrections alone.

Human review1 min read

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A candidate pattern is tested against empty, error, and permission states. Shared review then decides whether to keep it local, revise it, or promote it.

Test the state missing from the mockup

Before reusing a pattern, inspect the conditions its default screen hides.

Design systems1 min read

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