Spotify I’ve watched a lot of teams go after funding, and most of them are focused on the wrong thing. If you’re searching for funding, it’s worth pausing, because the act of searching can distract you from what actually matters, building something worth funding. Early in my career, I worked on a product that...
Continue readingSelling Ideas as a Service. Will Companies Buy? A Different Approach, but More Like College.
Spotify For most of my career, I’ve watched companies struggle with the same problem. They don’t lack execution. They lack direction. Teams are built to deliver, not to think upstream. So what happens is predictable. Roadmaps get filled with incremental work, innovation gets deprioritized, and the few good ideas that do surface are either...
Continue readingPI Planning is burning your budget. Here’s a better way.
Spotify Let me give you the number nobody talks about out loud. 100 people in a room for 2 days. Average fully-loaded cost per person: $800–$1,200/day. That’s $160,000–$240,000 of company time. Every single quarter. And for UX/UI teams? It’s often even worse than that. The dirty secret of PI Planning PI Planning was designed...
Continue readingAlways Ask Why
Spotify I wish I had learned this earlier. Not the frameworks. Not the tools. Not the processes. Just one habit. Always ask why. Early in my career, I was focused on doing things right. Hitting deadlines, delivering designs, following the process. If something was requested, I executed. If a feature was defined, I designed...
Continue readingPersonalization Is Broken
Spotify “Recommended for you” is not personalization. I used to believe it was. A few years ago, I was leading a product initiative where personalization was the centerpiece of the strategy. We had the data. Behavioral segments, historical activity, demographic overlays. We built recommendation engines, tailored dashboards, and dynamic content blocks that changed based...
Continue readingIs PI Planning Worth It?
Spotify It depends on what you think you’re buying. PI Planning, rooted in frameworks like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), was designed to solve a real problem. Large, distributed teams struggling to align on priorities, dependencies, and delivery timelines. On paper, it brings everyone into the same room, aligns strategy with execution, and creates a...
Continue readingUX Has Changed: What to Expect Today, Tomorrow, and Next Year
Spotify UX did not die. It shifted. Most teams are still operating on an outdated model, designing screens, flows, and components while the real change is happening underneath. AI, data, and system-level complexity are redefining what UX actually is. If you are still thinking in terms of pages and flows, you are already behind....
Continue readingWhy Most Design Systems Are About to Break
Spotify Static systems can’t support dynamic experiences. For years, design systems have been the foundation of scale. They brought consistency, speed, and alignment across teams. Components, tokens, patterns, and guidelines created a shared language that made large products manageable. That model worked when experiences were predictable. It does not hold in a world where...
Continue readingThe Illusion of Simplicity
Spotify Clean UI does not equal simple UX. This is one of the most persistent misconceptions in product design. A clean interface looks simple. It feels modern. Minimal layouts, generous whitespace, reduced visual noise. Everything appears easier. But appearance is not experience. You can remove visual clutter and still leave the user overwhelmed. That...
Continue readingAI Without UX Is Dangerous
Spotify Intelligence without guidance creates chaos. That is where we are heading with AI. Most organizations are racing to integrate artificial intelligence into their products. Faster outputs, smarter recommendations, automated workflows. On the surface, it looks like progress. Systems are becoming more capable, more responsive, more powerful. But capability without structure does not create...
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