Streaming solved access and broke almost everything else: discovery, ownership, and how artists get paid. My opinions, from someone who spent years designing and building listening experiences at Pandora and now works on royalty data.
Music · Product7 min read
When growth becomes the goal rather than the result, companies start consuming the things that made them worth growing: their products, their customers' trust, and their people. How that shows up inside product and engineering orgs, and the small, practical ways builders can push back.
Leadership · Product · Business7 min read
A song can be streamed in dozens of countries and still pay its writer almost nothing, not because nobody owes them, but because the money can't find them. A follow-up to my music post, on metadata, registrations and why global catalogues leak royalties.
Music · Data · Product5 min read
Building software keeps getting cheaper. What stays scarce is a clean, modular data model and an existing web of customers, partners and channels that will carry the product. Why I think that pairing is the nucleus of most winning formulas, and what the research says.
Architecture · Data · Business · Product9 min read
A decision log tells you what was chosen. A decision dossier tells you why, what was rejected and what it costs. Here's the format I use, and the bug it found that every other document had missed.
Product · Architecture · Leadership6 min read
Why I still build products against a one-day clock, and the habits that make it work: cutting scope hard, using the same stack every time, letting agents do the heavy lifting, leaning on a design system, and agreeing on what 'done' means before I start.
Product · Prototyping · Agents · Design systems8 min read