The Misses Behind the Patterns

If you want to know how I think before the call, this is the fastest way. Four essays, each opening on a real moment a product I worked on lost — or kept — a user’s trust. All four are about the same half-second: the pause before a professional acts on a correct answer. The Patterns library is the reference version of the same ideas: the do’s, don’ts, and demos. This is the story behind them.

The four essays

Adoption · AdTech

The Model Was Right. I Fixed the Wrong Thing.

A recommendation engine that beat the traders it was built for — and sat unused. Two weeks lost to the wrong suspect, and the handover change that moved adoption without touching the model.

Essay →
Failure States · Due Diligence

Design the Failure State First

A model that demoed beautifully and became a coin-flip on real deal data. Why the happy path is the smaller half of the job, and the failure state is where trust is won or lost.

Essay →
Explainability · FinTech

The Explainability Layer: Making AI Legible

A compliance officer asked one question the system couldn’t answer — and a trade went through unsupervised. Why “why this, not that?” is a design problem, not a data-science one.

Essay →
Human-in-the-Loop · EdTech

Human-in-the-Loop: When to Ask, When to Override

An accurate recommender that students skipped anyway — out of click fatigue, not disagreement. When asking for confirmation stops respecting the user and starts taxing them.

Essay →

Shorter pieces, on Substack

Read more on Substack ↗
  1. 012026-09-04 The Design System Playbook: How Great Teams Turn Taste Into Infrastructure A practical handbook for leaders who want their product to look and feel like one product — written from the trenches of actually building one.
  2. 022026-09-02 The Prompt I Paste Before Every Single Prototype It says almost nothing about the product. Why the order of your brief matters more than its words — and what I put in before the thing I am actually building.
  3. 032026-08-29 Nobody Reads Your Portfolio. Fifteen Strangers Skim It. The six-second scan is a myth — I traced it to a 2012 eye-tracking study of résumés, not portfolios. Twenty-three practitioner sources and eight academic ones describe four readers instead, and I rebuilt this site around what they actually say.
  4. 042026-05-20 The Agentic MVP: Why Your Next Launch Will Be Lovable, Not Just Viable Every founder knows the pit in their stomach on Launch Day. How the rise of agentic systems is rewriting what “minimum viable” means — and why lovability is now the bar.