Fifteen years building product, mostly in the parts nobody documents.

I spent about five years as a mechanical engineer, designing hardware for production lines, then ten in product management. I was the first and only product hire at Hazel Analytics, a 13-person public health data analytics startup, and I'm now employee #2 at Govstream.ai, a seed-stage govtech company, where I run product and operations.

At Govstream.ai I build the admin configuration and onboarding, lead product-led growth, and run implementations and pilots through to paid contracts. It's the same work I did at Hazel, where I ran the pilot that turned an offhand comment from a prospect's operations team into the company's second product. The Job They Already Did tells that one.

If you read one thing here, read Stay Close Enough to Stop: a team that hadn't shipped in two years, a weekly cadence of customer conversations, and the call to kill the product once those conversations showed what was real.

Cold Work is my workshop: essays when I'm working out an opinion, small tools when I want to hold myself to one. The name comes from metalworking, where cold working shapes metal below its recrystallization point and hardens it as you go. The essays share one idea, the temper line: on a blade, the boundary between the hard edge and the soft spine; in an organization, the boundary between what's written down and what people know from doing the work.

My own code is embedded C for microcontrollers and test rigs. Intervals, my delivery forecasting app, is deployed web software that AI agents wrote: I scope the work into tickets, the agents build overnight, and nothing ships until an independent automated review comes back clean and I approve it. Running the Factory covers how that system works and where it still falls short. Canon, an instruction pack for Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, applies the same idea to strategy: it tracks the agreed wording, so when the language drifts, someone notices and decides on purpose.