I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time. Today I’m finally hitting publish.
I’m a product manager and data scientist, which means I spend my days somewhere between the spreadsheet and the roadmap. Close to the numbers, but also close to the people and decisions those numbers are supposed to serve. This blog is my attempt to write from that in-between place.
Learning by teaching
We’ve all heard some version of this idea. When you listen to an idea, you learn it shallowly. Watch a video about it and it goes a little deeper. Read about it and it gets richer and deeper still. And if you actually do it, putting the idea into practice, you learn it deeper yet. But the highest level of learning is when you put in the effort to teach it to someone else, because to explain something completely you have to understand it much more deeply yourself.
For me, this blog can be that last part. I’m always listening to podcasts, watching a lot of YouTube, and sometimes reading posts and articles, but I get far fewer chances to teach. And I don’t mean teaching like a teacher in a classroom. I mean that when you set out to explain something, you’re forced to think about it much more deeply.
So this blog will be a place to put in that effort: to explore and think about the things I care about. Mostly, it’s for me, a way to think more deeply and do the work.
What I’ll write about
I don’t want it to be only one thing. Some posts will be technical: how I think about a model, a product metric, a messy dataset, a feature that shipped or didn’t. Some will be about technology as I actually live with it day to day, the tools I love, the ones I tolerate, and the small things that quietly change how I work. And some will just be about work itself: focus, burnout, meetings, momentum, the strange texture of a working life.
Why now
Honestly, I’ve been a reader for years and a writer for none. I learn best when I’m forced to explain something clearly, and I’ve decided to stop keeping all of that explaining inside my own head. I want to think out loud, in public, and see what holds up.
I don’t have a grand plan. No content calendar, no niche I’m trying to dominate. Just a hope that if I write honestly and consistently, a few of these posts will be useful to someone else standing in a similar in-between place, and that the act of writing will make me sharper at the work I actually do.
So this is the start. Thanks for being here for it. More soon.