Operations11 min
The Invisible Dependency
I told GTM we were almost ready to launch. Nothing standing between us and Japan. Then the production test failed, and introduced us to the invisible dependency.
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REAL STORIES BUILDING B2B PLATFORMS & API INFRASTRUCTURE
Real product decisions I made. Without knowing the answer
The Platform PM is a raw record of real product calls, hard tradeoffs, and lessons learned building B2B platforms and API infrastructure.
No right answers. Only the ones I picked.
13+ years building B2B products, making calls under uncertainty, and learning what "owning it" means. I owned a nine-figure ARR product portfolio at Twilio, a corporate venture P&L as GM, founded a VC-backed automation startup, and scaled cross-functional orgs across 10+ countries and timezones. Same instincts. New decisions and blind spots every time.
Who is writing this →There is a problem you're facing and would like some input.
Send me a real situation, not the abstraction. I answer most messages within a week.
Send me a message →Backlog
Situations I'm still writing my way through
These are the pieces in progress. These are unwritten. Vote for the one you want next and I'll move it up the queue (I write in that order).
- 47In progressOperations
A client's traffic spike took down our service, but not the API
The API had 100% uptime, but the service was still down. What a silent single point of failure actually costs. Nobody designed for this failure, and every client paid for it.
- 24QueuedOperations
The API they asked for, and never turned on
Customers asked it for years. When we shipped it, adopting it meant rewriting their internal process, and investing their engineering time. Wanting automation is not the same to be ready to pay for the switch.
- 11QueuedPlatform Modernization
The compressed roadmap. Modernizing after a Sev0.
We'd staged a ten-month modernization plan with the dependencies mapped in order. A Sev0 outage erased the sequence overnight. Leadership wanted visible progress in weeks, not a plan.
- 8QueuedPlatform Modernization
The uphill battle to fund platform modernization
Every planning cycle, modernization scored highest on important and lowest on urgent. Quarter after quarter, until we ran out of runway to keep deferring it.
- 4QueuedLeadership
The Peer-to-Boss Jump
I got the promotion I wanted. Last week I was in the standup as one of them. Now I run it. They already trusted me, that was never the question. The question was whether I trusted myself.
- 3QueuedMetrics
The accidental org chart
The lines between my sub-teams had formed organically over time, never by design. Redrawing them now might cost us months of delivery.