Insights
Thinking out loud.
Articles, frameworks, and honest conversations about AI transformation in education. From someone who builds, not just advises.
Featured
The HUMAN Protocol: A Framework for Deploying AI Without Losing Your Soul
Five questions. That's it. If you can answer yes to all five for an AI system, you're probably okay. If you hesitate on any of them, keep reading.
10 February 2026
Riding Bareback on a Fire Horse
Most people in 2026 are fighting the ocean. The calendar is full. The to-do list never shrinks. It feels productive. But here's the uncomfortable question: what actually moved forward?
10 February 2026
Robots Did Kung Fu on Live TV This Week. What Are You Still Afraid Of?
Last night, while you were sleeping, hundreds of humanoid robots performed kung fu on live television in front of 700 million people. Not CGI. Real robots. Swinging swords. On the biggest stage in the world. And it's coming whether you're ready or not.
10 February 2026
The Antidote Was Already in the Living Room
Every night around 8pm, our family does something that apparently makes us weird. We sit down together, one TV, no phones, and we watch a Chinese drama. In Chinese. What's happened since we started has been striking.
10 February 2026
The Year of the Fire Horse and the F It Line
2026 isn't just another year. It's the Year of the Fire Horse, the most untameable sign in Chinese astrology. The last one was 1966. The barriers that used to keep you in the classroom are falling faster than at any point in history. The universe is telling you to move.
10 February 2026
What I'd Tell Steven Bartlett About AI Employees
On December 30, I cried during Nessun Dorma at the Opera House. Two days later, my AI employee scanned 14 research papers while I slept. Both things are true. Understanding how they fit together is the most important question facing anyone building a company right now.
10 February 2026
The Sound That Stays: On Games, Opera, Drums, and What AI Will Never Touch
A video game soundtrack that haunted me. A night at the Opera House that broke me open. A son on the drums channelling 40,000 years of human rhythm. This is about the thread that connects them, and why AI will never hold it.
9 February 2026
UNESCO's AI in Education Framework: A Practitioner's Response
UNESCO's AI competency frameworks for students and teachers have good intentions. But in a world where 108,000 jobs were cut in January alone and five-year plans compress to five months, 'fostering readiness' sounds like rearranging deck chairs. A practitioner's critique of what they got right, where they're hot air, and where they're dangerously behind.
9 February 2026
What Are We Actually Certifying?
Australian universities don't have an AI cheating problem. They have an assessment problem. If a student can use ChatGPT to pass your assessment, the problem isn't the student. The problem is that your assessment was testing something a machine can do.
8 February 2026
Australia Is Gutting the One Thing AI Can't Replace
48 creative arts degrees axed. Year 12 drama down 39%. Dance down 38%. We're systematically destroying arts education at the exact moment it matters most. Because taste, judgement, and emotional intelligence are the skills AI can't automate.
8 February 2026
39% of Australian Teachers Plan to Leave. Here's What They Should Do Next.
According to AITSL, 39% of Australian teachers plan to leave before retirement. Another 35% aren't sure they'll stay. If you're one of them, you're not the problem. The system is. Here's how to translate your skills and build what comes next.
29 January 2026
Why the Fastest-Growing AI Company Stopped Writing Rules
Anthropic tried governing AI with rules. It didn't work. Their new constitution teaches Claude why things matter, not just what to do. The result? 32% of enterprise LLM usage. Your organisation's AI governance might be learning the wrong lesson.
29 January 2026
Half of Edtech Exists to Fix the Other Half
The average US school district now accesses 2,982 distinct edtech tools annually. This isn't an ecosystem. It's a Rube Goldberg machine where everyone's selling duct tape. And AI agents are about to make most of it obsolete.
29 January 2026
The AI Experts Are Missing the Point
My LinkedIn feed is drowning in AI experts with frameworks, prompt libraries, and rocket emojis. But sitting with a pen and an actual human across the table, something clicked: almost all of it focuses on the wrong bottleneck. The production constraint is gone. What matters now is taste, judgment, connection, and trust.
29 January 2026
We Didn't Give Our Kids Screens Until High School. Here's What Happened.
My son is 17 and about to finish Year 12. My daughter is 14. Neither of them had a personal device until they started high school. No iPad at the restaurant. No phone on the car ride. No YouTube before bed. People thought we were crazy. Here's what happened instead.
28 January 2026
AI Is Coming for Teachers (But Not How You Think)
You've seen the headlines. 'AI tutor outperforms human teachers.' 'ChatGPT passes teacher certification exam.' The fear is understandable. But AI isn't replacing teachers. It's coming for the parts of teaching that teachers hate: the marking, the lesson planning, the administration. The human skills that make you a good teacher are becoming more valuable, not less.
28 January 2026
When Your Admin Makes the Decision For You: Recognising the Push-Out
You know something is wrong before you can name it. The feedback that used to be supportive becomes critical. The observations that used to be formalities become interrogations. Maybe you're put on an 'improvement plan.' Maybe you're suddenly not invited to meetings you used to attend. And then one day you realise: they're not trying to help you improve. They're building a case.
28 January 2026
The Salary Shame Spiral: Why Teachers Feel Embarrassed About What They Earn (And What To Do About It)
Someone asks what you do for work. You say you're a teacher. They nod, maybe say something about how important teachers are, and then the conversation moves on. What they don't ask is what you earn. And you're relieved, because if they did, you'd feel that familiar tightness in your chest. This is the salary shame spiral. And it's keeping you stuck.
28 January 2026
Every Lesson Plan You've Written Was Product Management. You Just Called It Teaching.
I kept a folder of lesson plans from my first year teaching. Dog-eared printouts with highlighter marks and coffee stains. I found them last year while clearing out a box I'd been dragging between houses for over a decade. I opened one. Year 8 Japanese. Food and Cuisine. And I saw something I'd never seen before. It wasn't a lesson plan. It was a product roadmap.
28 January 2026
What My Editor Taught Me About Taste (And Why I Couldn't See It Myself)
I write about taste constantly. I've written thousands of words about it. I've explained it to clients. I've built frameworks around it. And then I handed my manuscript to an editor and discovered I couldn't see my own blind spots. Taste requires other people. Your blind spots are invisible to you. That's what makes them blind spots.
24 January 2026
How to Build a Portfolio When You've "Only" Been Teaching
"But I don't have any experience." I hear this from teachers constantly. Here's what I want you to understand: you don't have zero experience. You have years of experience that nobody taught you how to present. The problem isn't that you lack a portfolio. The problem is that you've been thinking about portfolios wrong.
23 January 2026
How Classroom Management Prepared Me for Stakeholder Alignment
The IT team was hostile from day one. They hadn't wanted Canvas. They'd been overruled. The temptation was to work around them. But I'd spent years in classrooms. I knew exactly what happens when you try to work around someone who doesn't want to cooperate. So I did what any experienced teacher would do. I taught them.
22 January 2026
Formative Assessment is Just A/B Testing (You've Been Doing It for Years)
At Microsoft, a senior PM explained 'continuous discovery' and 'testing assumptions before building.' I almost laughed. I'd spent years testing assumptions. Every single day. With teenagers who told me exactly what they thought. The PM was describing formative assessment—she just didn't know the word for it.
21 January 2026
What to Do When You Don't Have a Big Idea (Yet)
"I don't know what I'd build." This is the most common blocker. Here's the truth: the best products don't come from big ideas—they come from small frustrations you decide to fix. Neither Moodle nor Guest Loop was a stroke of genius. Here's the friction audit framework to find problems worth solving.
20 January 2026
The 80% Rule: What Microsoft Taught Me About Customer Time
At Microsoft, someone told me: 'If you're not spending 80% of your day talking to customers, you're not a product manager.' As a teacher, I'd spent 100% of my day with my users. They told me exactly what they thought whether I asked or not. Here's the framework for customer conversations—and why teachers already know how to do this.
19 January 2026
How a PC from the E-Waste Pile Taught Me Product Management
A discarded computer outside a Tokyo university building. No budget, no server, no IT support. Just Moodle, Linux, and a problem I couldn't ignore. Twenty years later, the same pattern built Guest Loop. Teachers have been doing product management for years—they just called it teaching.
18 January 2026
The Crayon Effect: Why Simplicity Is Your Greatest Competitive Advantage
At Microsoft, surrounded by brilliant technical people, the ability to make complex things simple was genuinely rare. People had PhDs and couldn't explain their work. I wasn't doing anything special—I was doing what teachers do. Here's why that's your competitive advantage.
17 January 2026
From Lesson Plans to Launches: What Teaching Actually Taught You
You've been doing product management for years. You just didn't know it. Backward design is product thinking. Scaffolding is onboarding. Differentiation is segmentation. Every skill you need to build something valuable, you've been practicing in the classroom. Here's the translation guide.
16 January 2026
The Skills You Already Have (And What They're Actually Worth)
Nobody told you that teaching developed some of the most valuable skills in the modern economy. Explaining complex things simply, reading a room, meeting people where they are—these aren't just teaching skills. They're product management, consulting, and sales skills worth $150-200K. You have them. You just use different words.
15 January 2026
From Gatekeeper to Enabler: Transforming Enterprise Governance for the AI Era
Most enterprise governance frameworks were designed for a world that no longer exists. They take 14-30 weeks before development even begins. The cost of being slow now exceeds the cost of being wrong. Here's how AI-augmented governance moves at the speed of opportunity.
14 January 2026
The HUMAN Protocol: What China's AI Law Can Teach Your Organisation About Responsible AI Deployment
China's proposed AI anthropomorphism law is the most practical AI safety framework I've seen from any government. Not abstract principles—actual, concrete requirements you can implement today. Here's the HUMAN Protocol: five categories of safeguards to protect your people whilst enabling AI innovation.
13 January 2026
The Talent Will Leave Before the Startups Arrive
Your moat is real. Your brand is real. Your scale is real. But the threat isn't that startups will disrupt you. The threat is that you'll slowly lose the ability to do anything new. The startups won't kill you directly—they'll nibble at the edges whilst your best people walk out the door.
12 January 2026
From Production to Judgment: What AI Means for Workers, Universities, and Your Kids
AI isn't replacing cognitive workers. It's changing what cognitive work means. The role of humans is shifting from production to judgment. And almost nobody is prepared for it—not workers, not universities, and definitely not the K-12 system shaping your children.
11 January 2026
Judgment, Accountability, and Taste: What Actually Makes an Organisation Capable
AI can now produce almost anything you ask for. But it cannot decide which draft is right, take accountability when wrong, or develop the taste that distinguishes excellent from acceptable. These three capabilities are what separate capable organisations from those with capable tools.
11 January 2026
The F*ck It Line: Why Courage Is a Daily Practice (Not a Personality Trait)
Capability isn't built in training rooms. It's built in the moments where you cross the line between comfort and growth. Every day, you either cross it or you don't. Here's why that matters more than you think.
11 January 2026
Teachers Make the Best Product Managers: How to Pivot Your Career or Build a Side Income Starting Today
Teachers have skills that companies will pay $150,000+ for. Product management is one of the highest-paid, most in-demand roles in tech, and the skills you use every day in the classroom are exactly what makes great PMs.
8 January 2026
The Grace Period Is Over: What Higher Education Must Actually Do About AI in 2026
Nick McIntosh's diagnosis is clear: higher education's AI gap is undeniable. But diagnosis isn't treatment. After 20+ years in education technology, here's what institutions must do this quarter, not this decade.
8 January 2026
What Aviation Learnt (That Your AI Strategy Hasn't)
In 1935, a plane crash killed two pilots because the aircraft was 'too complicated for one person to fly.' The solution wasn't to make planes simpler. It was to build systems that made complexity manageable. AI is at the same inflection point.
7 January 2026
The Budget You Already Have (You Just Don't Know It Yet)
What if I told you there's tens of thousands of dollars hiding in your Azure bill? And what if that money could fund your transformation instead of disappearing back to Finance?
7 January 2026
Air Cover: The Leadership Skill Nobody Teaches
Your job as a leader isn't to manage your team. It's to protect them from the organisation.
6 January 2026
The Carrot, Not the Stick: How to Build Capability and Bring Everyone Along for the Journey
Fear gets attention. Hope gets action. Here's how to transform your organisation without leaving anyone behind.
6 January 2026
The Consultant Has Been Here Three Years
At what point do we admit this isn't a project—it's a dependency?
6 January 2026
When Did "We Can Build That" Become a Radical Idea?
Ten years ago, someone would propose building something and the room would discuss how. Now the room laughs.
6 January 2026
The $2 Million Platform Nobody Uses
Every enterprise has one. Usually more than one. How did this happen?
6 January 2026
Your Best Developers Are Updating Their LinkedIn Profiles
They're not telling you why in exit interviews. They're telling each other on Slack.
5 January 2026
The Meeting Where Ideas Go to Die
Every organisation has them. The rooms where good ideas enter and never leave.
5 January 2026
Stop Renting Software You Could Own
Why your Capex/Opex framework is costing you a fortune in the AI era.
4 January 2026
The End of 'Technical' vs 'Non-Technical'
Why every knowledge worker needs a new skill tree for the AI era.
4 January 2026
The Real Skill These Teens Learnt Wasn't Coding
How AI tools accidentally teach the meta-skills that schools have struggled to develop for decades.
31 December 2025
A 13-Year-Old Can Now Build What Your IT Department Quotes 6 Months For
The uncomfortable implications of democratised development for enterprise technology organisations.
31 December 2025
Vibe Coding Is a Terrible Name for Something Revolutionary
Why underselling the biggest democratisation of technical capability since spreadsheets is a strategic mistake.
31 December 2025
The Vibe Coding Spectrum: When to Close Your Eyes and When to Look
The CEO of a $29 billion AI coding company just warned that vibe coding builds 'shaky foundations.' He's right. But that doesn't mean you should stop.
25 December 2024
Meta's PMs Are Building Apps Without Engineers. What's Your Excuse?
Product managers at one of the world's largest tech companies are shipping prototypes directly to Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, your organisation is still writing requirements documents.
20 December 2024
Your Innovation Lab Is Theatre. Here's What Actually Works.
The beanbags, the whiteboards, the 'fail fast' posters. None of it matters if nothing ships.
20 December 2024
The FlightX Playbook: How to Build Your Own Disruption Team
A practical guide for universities and edtech companies that want to out-experiment their way to relevance.
20 December 2024
Stop. Start. Keep.
A framework for teams that want to build capability instead of buying dependency.
20 December 2024
Why Australian Universities Need a Head of Failure
The sector faces an existential threat. The response so far? Committees, principles, and caution. It's not enough.
17 December 2024
The Vendor Is Not Your Friend
They're not evil. They're just not aligned with your success. Understanding the difference could save your organisation.
17 December 2024
Strategic Imagination: The Skill That Separates Builders from Bystanders
In an era of AI disruption, the ability to envision and act on alternative futures isn't optional. It's survival.
17 December 2024
The "We're Waiting for AI to Mature" Trap
The most expensive words in technology right now. Why waiting for AI to mature is costing you more than early adoption ever could.
17 December 2024
The Biggest Cost Is the Decision You Haven't Made Yet
In a world moving at AI speed, indecision isn't caution. It's suicide. Why decision speed matters more than decision quality.
16 December 2024
The Consultant Industrial Complex
They need you to stay broken. That's the business model. Why the consulting industry optimises for dependency instead of solutions.
16 December 2024
Your IT Department Is a Procurement Office
When all you do is buy and integrate, you've stopped being a technology function. How IT departments became procurement offices, and what to do about it.
16 December 2024
Capability Over Dependency: A Manifesto
The organisations that thrive will be the ones that can solve their own problems. Everyone else will be at the mercy of those who can.
9 December 2024
Building Isn't Coding. It's Thinking in Systems.
The skill that matters isn't writing code. It's understanding how things connect.
10 December 2024
AI Should Make Learning Harder, Not Easier
The entire EdTech industry has it backwards. Friction isn't the enemy of learning, it's the point.
8 December 2024
Universities Won't Be Replaced by AI. They'll Become Its Foundation. (Or They'll Disappear.)
The choice isn't whether to change. It's whether to lead or be bypassed entirely.
7 December 2024
Your Competition Is a Two-Person Team You've Never Heard Of
While you're watching incumbents, someone in a spare bedroom is building the thing that makes you irrelevant.
11 December 2024
Why Are You Letting People Who Know Two-Fifths of F*%k All About AI Determine Your Future?
The people making your AI decisions have never built anything with AI. That should terrify you.
13 December 2024
Your SaaS Renewal Is Coming Up. Before You Sign, Try Building It Yourself.
The worst case? Your team learns new skills and you write better requirements. The best case? You never sign that contract again.
12 December 2024
Your SaaS Strategy Is a Slow-Motion Surrender
If you're outsourcing capability to save risk, you're buying a ticket to irrelevance. A provocation for leaders who think 'buy, don't build' is the safe choice.
6 December 2024
The New Risk Equation
The 'safe' choice isn't safe anymore. Staying dependent is now the biggest risk you can take.
5 December 2024
Why Would Anyone Pay $50K for a Lecture When Claude Is Free?
The question every university should be terrified to answer. A reckoning is coming for higher education.
3 December 2024
Your Software Isn't a Competitive Advantage. It's a Stalemate.
When everyone uses the same tools, nobody wins. That's by design. A provocation about SaaS economics and real differentiation.
2 December 2024
Vibe Coding Will Get Someone Killed
49 researchers just published a warning. The industry isn't listening. A critical look at AI-generated code and professional responsibility.
1 December 2024
AI Made Coding Easy. That's Not the Hard Part Anymore.
The skills that made you valuable last year might be the wrong skills entirely. Understanding the shift from implementation to thinking.
30 November 2024
The Dangerous Myth of the AI Sous-Chef
The metaphor is comforting. The reality is terrifying. Why the popular AI sous-chef analogy masks abdication of responsibility.
29 November 2024
Stop Hiring Coders. Start Hiring Thinkers.
Your job descriptions are optimised for a world that no longer exists. The skills inversion and what to hire for now.
28 November 2024
The CrowdStrike Lesson: What Happens When System 1 Runs Wild
July 19, 2024. A single update. 8.5 million machines. $5.4 billion in damages. And a preview of what's coming with AI.
27 November 2024
All Articles
Intent Engineering in Higher Education
Klarna's AI agent resolved customer tickets in 2 minutes instead of 11. Then customers started leaving. Universities are walking into this exact trap.
The HUMAN Protocol: A Framework for Deploying AI Without Losing Your Soul
Five questions. That's it. If you can answer yes to all five for an AI system, you're probably okay. If you hesitate on any of them, keep reading.
Riding Bareback on a Fire Horse
Most people in 2026 are fighting the ocean. The calendar is full. The to-do list never shrinks. It feels productive. But here's the uncomfortable question: what actually moved forward?
Robots Did Kung Fu on Live TV This Week. What Are You Still Afraid Of?
Last night, while you were sleeping, hundreds of humanoid robots performed kung fu on live television in front of 700 million people. Not CGI. Real robots. Swinging swords. On the biggest stage in the world. And it's coming whether you're ready or not.
The Antidote Was Already in the Living Room
Every night around 8pm, our family does something that apparently makes us weird. We sit down together, one TV, no phones, and we watch a Chinese drama. In Chinese. What's happened since we started has been striking.
The Year of the Fire Horse and the F It Line
2026 isn't just another year. It's the Year of the Fire Horse, the most untameable sign in Chinese astrology. The last one was 1966. The barriers that used to keep you in the classroom are falling faster than at any point in history. The universe is telling you to move.
What I'd Tell Steven Bartlett About AI Employees
On December 30, I cried during Nessun Dorma at the Opera House. Two days later, my AI employee scanned 14 research papers while I slept. Both things are true. Understanding how they fit together is the most important question facing anyone building a company right now.
The Sound That Stays: On Games, Opera, Drums, and What AI Will Never Touch
A video game soundtrack that haunted me. A night at the Opera House that broke me open. A son on the drums channelling 40,000 years of human rhythm. This is about the thread that connects them, and why AI will never hold it.
UNESCO's AI in Education Framework: A Practitioner's Response
UNESCO's AI competency frameworks for students and teachers have good intentions. But in a world where 108,000 jobs were cut in January alone and five-year plans compress to five months, 'fostering readiness' sounds like rearranging deck chairs. A practitioner's critique of what they got right, where they're hot air, and where they're dangerously behind.
What Are We Actually Certifying?
Australian universities don't have an AI cheating problem. They have an assessment problem. If a student can use ChatGPT to pass your assessment, the problem isn't the student. The problem is that your assessment was testing something a machine can do.
Australia Is Gutting the One Thing AI Can't Replace
48 creative arts degrees axed. Year 12 drama down 39%. Dance down 38%. We're systematically destroying arts education at the exact moment it matters most. Because taste, judgement, and emotional intelligence are the skills AI can't automate.
39% of Australian Teachers Plan to Leave. Here's What They Should Do Next.
According to AITSL, 39% of Australian teachers plan to leave before retirement. Another 35% aren't sure they'll stay. If you're one of them, you're not the problem. The system is. Here's how to translate your skills and build what comes next.
Why the Fastest-Growing AI Company Stopped Writing Rules
Anthropic tried governing AI with rules. It didn't work. Their new constitution teaches Claude why things matter, not just what to do. The result? 32% of enterprise LLM usage. Your organisation's AI governance might be learning the wrong lesson.
Half of Edtech Exists to Fix the Other Half
The average US school district now accesses 2,982 distinct edtech tools annually. This isn't an ecosystem. It's a Rube Goldberg machine where everyone's selling duct tape. And AI agents are about to make most of it obsolete.
The AI Experts Are Missing the Point
My LinkedIn feed is drowning in AI experts with frameworks, prompt libraries, and rocket emojis. But sitting with a pen and an actual human across the table, something clicked: almost all of it focuses on the wrong bottleneck. The production constraint is gone. What matters now is taste, judgment, connection, and trust.
We Didn't Give Our Kids Screens Until High School. Here's What Happened.
My son is 17 and about to finish Year 12. My daughter is 14. Neither of them had a personal device until they started high school. No iPad at the restaurant. No phone on the car ride. No YouTube before bed. People thought we were crazy. Here's what happened instead.
AI Is Coming for Teachers (But Not How You Think)
You've seen the headlines. 'AI tutor outperforms human teachers.' 'ChatGPT passes teacher certification exam.' The fear is understandable. But AI isn't replacing teachers. It's coming for the parts of teaching that teachers hate: the marking, the lesson planning, the administration. The human skills that make you a good teacher are becoming more valuable, not less.
When Your Admin Makes the Decision For You: Recognising the Push-Out
You know something is wrong before you can name it. The feedback that used to be supportive becomes critical. The observations that used to be formalities become interrogations. Maybe you're put on an 'improvement plan.' Maybe you're suddenly not invited to meetings you used to attend. And then one day you realise: they're not trying to help you improve. They're building a case.
The Salary Shame Spiral: Why Teachers Feel Embarrassed About What They Earn (And What To Do About It)
Someone asks what you do for work. You say you're a teacher. They nod, maybe say something about how important teachers are, and then the conversation moves on. What they don't ask is what you earn. And you're relieved, because if they did, you'd feel that familiar tightness in your chest. This is the salary shame spiral. And it's keeping you stuck.
Every Lesson Plan You've Written Was Product Management. You Just Called It Teaching.
I kept a folder of lesson plans from my first year teaching. Dog-eared printouts with highlighter marks and coffee stains. I found them last year while clearing out a box I'd been dragging between houses for over a decade. I opened one. Year 8 Japanese. Food and Cuisine. And I saw something I'd never seen before. It wasn't a lesson plan. It was a product roadmap.
What My Editor Taught Me About Taste (And Why I Couldn't See It Myself)
I write about taste constantly. I've written thousands of words about it. I've explained it to clients. I've built frameworks around it. And then I handed my manuscript to an editor and discovered I couldn't see my own blind spots. Taste requires other people. Your blind spots are invisible to you. That's what makes them blind spots.
How to Build a Portfolio When You've "Only" Been Teaching
"But I don't have any experience." I hear this from teachers constantly. Here's what I want you to understand: you don't have zero experience. You have years of experience that nobody taught you how to present. The problem isn't that you lack a portfolio. The problem is that you've been thinking about portfolios wrong.
How Classroom Management Prepared Me for Stakeholder Alignment
The IT team was hostile from day one. They hadn't wanted Canvas. They'd been overruled. The temptation was to work around them. But I'd spent years in classrooms. I knew exactly what happens when you try to work around someone who doesn't want to cooperate. So I did what any experienced teacher would do. I taught them.
Formative Assessment is Just A/B Testing (You've Been Doing It for Years)
At Microsoft, a senior PM explained 'continuous discovery' and 'testing assumptions before building.' I almost laughed. I'd spent years testing assumptions. Every single day. With teenagers who told me exactly what they thought. The PM was describing formative assessment—she just didn't know the word for it.
What to Do When You Don't Have a Big Idea (Yet)
"I don't know what I'd build." This is the most common blocker. Here's the truth: the best products don't come from big ideas—they come from small frustrations you decide to fix. Neither Moodle nor Guest Loop was a stroke of genius. Here's the friction audit framework to find problems worth solving.
The 80% Rule: What Microsoft Taught Me About Customer Time
At Microsoft, someone told me: 'If you're not spending 80% of your day talking to customers, you're not a product manager.' As a teacher, I'd spent 100% of my day with my users. They told me exactly what they thought whether I asked or not. Here's the framework for customer conversations—and why teachers already know how to do this.
How a PC from the E-Waste Pile Taught Me Product Management
A discarded computer outside a Tokyo university building. No budget, no server, no IT support. Just Moodle, Linux, and a problem I couldn't ignore. Twenty years later, the same pattern built Guest Loop. Teachers have been doing product management for years—they just called it teaching.
The Crayon Effect: Why Simplicity Is Your Greatest Competitive Advantage
At Microsoft, surrounded by brilliant technical people, the ability to make complex things simple was genuinely rare. People had PhDs and couldn't explain their work. I wasn't doing anything special—I was doing what teachers do. Here's why that's your competitive advantage.
From Lesson Plans to Launches: What Teaching Actually Taught You
You've been doing product management for years. You just didn't know it. Backward design is product thinking. Scaffolding is onboarding. Differentiation is segmentation. Every skill you need to build something valuable, you've been practicing in the classroom. Here's the translation guide.
The Skills You Already Have (And What They're Actually Worth)
Nobody told you that teaching developed some of the most valuable skills in the modern economy. Explaining complex things simply, reading a room, meeting people where they are—these aren't just teaching skills. They're product management, consulting, and sales skills worth $150-200K. You have them. You just use different words.
From Gatekeeper to Enabler: Transforming Enterprise Governance for the AI Era
Most enterprise governance frameworks were designed for a world that no longer exists. They take 14-30 weeks before development even begins. The cost of being slow now exceeds the cost of being wrong. Here's how AI-augmented governance moves at the speed of opportunity.
The HUMAN Protocol: What China's AI Law Can Teach Your Organisation About Responsible AI Deployment
China's proposed AI anthropomorphism law is the most practical AI safety framework I've seen from any government. Not abstract principles—actual, concrete requirements you can implement today. Here's the HUMAN Protocol: five categories of safeguards to protect your people whilst enabling AI innovation.
The Talent Will Leave Before the Startups Arrive
Your moat is real. Your brand is real. Your scale is real. But the threat isn't that startups will disrupt you. The threat is that you'll slowly lose the ability to do anything new. The startups won't kill you directly—they'll nibble at the edges whilst your best people walk out the door.
From Production to Judgment: What AI Means for Workers, Universities, and Your Kids
AI isn't replacing cognitive workers. It's changing what cognitive work means. The role of humans is shifting from production to judgment. And almost nobody is prepared for it—not workers, not universities, and definitely not the K-12 system shaping your children.
Judgment, Accountability, and Taste: What Actually Makes an Organisation Capable
AI can now produce almost anything you ask for. But it cannot decide which draft is right, take accountability when wrong, or develop the taste that distinguishes excellent from acceptable. These three capabilities are what separate capable organisations from those with capable tools.
The F*ck It Line: Why Courage Is a Daily Practice (Not a Personality Trait)
Capability isn't built in training rooms. It's built in the moments where you cross the line between comfort and growth. Every day, you either cross it or you don't. Here's why that matters more than you think.
Teachers Make the Best Product Managers: How to Pivot Your Career or Build a Side Income Starting Today
Teachers have skills that companies will pay $150,000+ for. Product management is one of the highest-paid, most in-demand roles in tech, and the skills you use every day in the classroom are exactly what makes great PMs.
The Grace Period Is Over: What Higher Education Must Actually Do About AI in 2026
Nick McIntosh's diagnosis is clear: higher education's AI gap is undeniable. But diagnosis isn't treatment. After 20+ years in education technology, here's what institutions must do this quarter, not this decade.
What Aviation Learnt (That Your AI Strategy Hasn't)
In 1935, a plane crash killed two pilots because the aircraft was 'too complicated for one person to fly.' The solution wasn't to make planes simpler. It was to build systems that made complexity manageable. AI is at the same inflection point.
The Budget You Already Have (You Just Don't Know It Yet)
What if I told you there's tens of thousands of dollars hiding in your Azure bill? And what if that money could fund your transformation instead of disappearing back to Finance?
Air Cover: The Leadership Skill Nobody Teaches
Your job as a leader isn't to manage your team. It's to protect them from the organisation.
The Carrot, Not the Stick: How to Build Capability and Bring Everyone Along for the Journey
Fear gets attention. Hope gets action. Here's how to transform your organisation without leaving anyone behind.
The Consultant Has Been Here Three Years
At what point do we admit this isn't a project—it's a dependency?
When Did "We Can Build That" Become a Radical Idea?
Ten years ago, someone would propose building something and the room would discuss how. Now the room laughs.
The $2 Million Platform Nobody Uses
Every enterprise has one. Usually more than one. How did this happen?
Your Best Developers Are Updating Their LinkedIn Profiles
They're not telling you why in exit interviews. They're telling each other on Slack.
The Meeting Where Ideas Go to Die
Every organisation has them. The rooms where good ideas enter and never leave.
Stop Renting Software You Could Own
Why your Capex/Opex framework is costing you a fortune in the AI era.
The End of 'Technical' vs 'Non-Technical'
Why every knowledge worker needs a new skill tree for the AI era.
The Real Skill These Teens Learnt Wasn't Coding
How AI tools accidentally teach the meta-skills that schools have struggled to develop for decades.
A 13-Year-Old Can Now Build What Your IT Department Quotes 6 Months For
The uncomfortable implications of democratised development for enterprise technology organisations.
Vibe Coding Is a Terrible Name for Something Revolutionary
Why underselling the biggest democratisation of technical capability since spreadsheets is a strategic mistake.
The Vibe Coding Spectrum: When to Close Your Eyes and When to Look
The CEO of a $29 billion AI coding company just warned that vibe coding builds 'shaky foundations.' He's right. But that doesn't mean you should stop.
Meta's PMs Are Building Apps Without Engineers. What's Your Excuse?
Product managers at one of the world's largest tech companies are shipping prototypes directly to Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, your organisation is still writing requirements documents.
Your Innovation Lab Is Theatre. Here's What Actually Works.
The beanbags, the whiteboards, the 'fail fast' posters. None of it matters if nothing ships.
The FlightX Playbook: How to Build Your Own Disruption Team
A practical guide for universities and edtech companies that want to out-experiment their way to relevance.
Stop. Start. Keep.
A framework for teams that want to build capability instead of buying dependency.
Why Australian Universities Need a Head of Failure
The sector faces an existential threat. The response so far? Committees, principles, and caution. It's not enough.
The Vendor Is Not Your Friend
They're not evil. They're just not aligned with your success. Understanding the difference could save your organisation.
Strategic Imagination: The Skill That Separates Builders from Bystanders
In an era of AI disruption, the ability to envision and act on alternative futures isn't optional. It's survival.
The "We're Waiting for AI to Mature" Trap
The most expensive words in technology right now. Why waiting for AI to mature is costing you more than early adoption ever could.
The Biggest Cost Is the Decision You Haven't Made Yet
In a world moving at AI speed, indecision isn't caution. It's suicide. Why decision speed matters more than decision quality.
The Consultant Industrial Complex
They need you to stay broken. That's the business model. Why the consulting industry optimises for dependency instead of solutions.
Your IT Department Is a Procurement Office
When all you do is buy and integrate, you've stopped being a technology function. How IT departments became procurement offices, and what to do about it.
Capability Over Dependency: A Manifesto
The organisations that thrive will be the ones that can solve their own problems. Everyone else will be at the mercy of those who can.
Building Isn't Coding. It's Thinking in Systems.
The skill that matters isn't writing code. It's understanding how things connect.
AI Should Make Learning Harder, Not Easier
The entire EdTech industry has it backwards. Friction isn't the enemy of learning, it's the point.
Universities Won't Be Replaced by AI. They'll Become Its Foundation. (Or They'll Disappear.)
The choice isn't whether to change. It's whether to lead or be bypassed entirely.
Your Competition Is a Two-Person Team You've Never Heard Of
While you're watching incumbents, someone in a spare bedroom is building the thing that makes you irrelevant.
Why Are You Letting People Who Know Two-Fifths of F*%k All About AI Determine Your Future?
The people making your AI decisions have never built anything with AI. That should terrify you.
Your SaaS Renewal Is Coming Up. Before You Sign, Try Building It Yourself.
The worst case? Your team learns new skills and you write better requirements. The best case? You never sign that contract again.
Your SaaS Strategy Is a Slow-Motion Surrender
If you're outsourcing capability to save risk, you're buying a ticket to irrelevance. A provocation for leaders who think 'buy, don't build' is the safe choice.
The New Risk Equation
The 'safe' choice isn't safe anymore. Staying dependent is now the biggest risk you can take.
I Built My Own Competitive Advantage in a Weekend. Then I Turned It Into a Business.
How frustration with generic software led to Guest Loop, and what it taught me about what SaaS should actually be.
Why Would Anyone Pay $50K for a Lecture When Claude Is Free?
The question every university should be terrified to answer. A reckoning is coming for higher education.
Your Software Isn't a Competitive Advantage. It's a Stalemate.
When everyone uses the same tools, nobody wins. That's by design. A provocation about SaaS economics and real differentiation.
Vibe Coding Will Get Someone Killed
49 researchers just published a warning. The industry isn't listening. A critical look at AI-generated code and professional responsibility.
AI Made Coding Easy. That's Not the Hard Part Anymore.
The skills that made you valuable last year might be the wrong skills entirely. Understanding the shift from implementation to thinking.
The Dangerous Myth of the AI Sous-Chef
The metaphor is comforting. The reality is terrifying. Why the popular AI sous-chef analogy masks abdication of responsibility.
Stop Hiring Coders. Start Hiring Thinkers.
Your job descriptions are optimised for a world that no longer exists. The skills inversion and what to hire for now.
The CrowdStrike Lesson: What Happens When System 1 Runs Wild
July 19, 2024. A single update. 8.5 million machines. $5.4 billion in damages. And a preview of what's coming with AI.
Why I'm Building Ink Wise: The Problem No One Wants to Admit
Contracts are where risk lives, and no one actually reads them. Here's why that's a bigger problem than you think.
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