Last week I wrote about what 4.5 years at Ontra taught me. This is the companion piece, about deciding to leave and how to leave well once you do. The decision to leave was one I went back and forth on a lot. I had seen Ontra through much
Four and a half years ago, I joined a Series B startup called Ontra as an associate product manager. My last day is this Friday. Over the last 4 years and change, I've learned a lot and seen a company change from scrappy startup into a scaled legal
In a prior post, we broke down how large language models actually work — tokenization, embeddings, transformers, context windows, and hallucinations. If you haven't read that one yet, go do that first. This builds directly on it. Here's the key takeaway from that post: LLMs are incredibly
Beyond the Backlog, AI Deep Dive, Part 3 In the first post, we cracked open deep learning: nodes, layers, weights, backpropagation, and the fundamental machinery that lets neural networks learn from data. In the second, we zoomed into large language models: transformers, attention, context windows, and the mechanisms that make
In the last post, we cracked open the black box of neural networks. Nodes, layers, weights, backpropagation — the fundamental machinery that powers deep learning. If you missed it, go read that first. Everything in this post builds on that foundation. An LLM is a neural network — a very specific, very
Every product leader I know is making decisions about AI features right now: which capabilities to build, where to invest, and how to evaluate what's real versus what's hype. And yet, I don't think the vast majority of product people know what's
A few weeks ago, a PM friend of mine was prepping for an interview at a well-known growth-stage company. We were chatting about the interview process and how it's changed since they were last looking for a new role, and one set of questions in particular was different.
There's enormous pressure right now to go agentic. Every product leader I talk to is feeling it — from their boards, their customers, their competitors, and honestly, from themselves. The promise is real. Agentic AI can automate complex workflows, reduce toil, and unlock value that wasn't possible
I just finished Julie Zhuo's "The Making of a Manager," and while it's technically a book about general management, I found myself dog-earing pages that speak directly to the challenges I face as a product leader early in my management journey. Zhuo's
Most product leaders I talk to are obsessed with how to build AI into their products. What features to ship. What models to use. How to differentiate. Those are the right questions — but they're incomplete. The question that gets far less attention: how is your organization actually using
I just finished "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop, and I can't stop thinking about J.C.R. Licklider. The book is a biography of Licklider and the history of the early computing revolution. "Lick" (as everyone called him) was a psychologist who
This is the third post in my series recapping takeaways from Reforge's AI Strategy course. Part 1 covered how AI accelerates PMF collapse; Part 2 introduced the AI Maker Matrix for user segmentation. This week, I'm diving into something that's been gnawing at me