Field notes · drafts in motion

Notes on product, robotics, and shipping real things.

Things I've learned the hard way — at customer sites, on production floors, in arguments with engineers about path-planning edge cases. Four essays are live (three robotics-PM field notes, one philosophy essay). Two more drafts in motion.

Published04 In motion02 Cadencemonthly Next dropJune 2026

01 Published · June 2025

0→1 in robotics: what's different, what's the same.

Five years of commercial robotics — two product launches and autonomous-fleet programs at three Fortune 500 plants on three continents. Where SaaS playbooks help, where they break, and what to do about it. Especially around customer-readiness.

12 min read · 4 illustrations · Read the essay →

02 Published · December 2025

Pilots, Pricing, and the ROI Deck.

The commercial side of robotics 0→1: why pilots stall, how pricing changes the company, and the slide a CFO will actually sign. The robot is the easy part. The slide is where the company actually closes.

11 min read · 4 illustrations · Read the essay →

03 Published · February 2026

Don't Guess. Let the Customer Tell You.

Why I shipped a configurable rule framework instead of an ML-based anomaly detector — and why most robotics observability products are about to build the wrong thing here. Don't model the customer's world inside your product. Give them a notation for describing it.

13 min read · 4 illustrations · Read the essay →

04 Published · May 2026

Proximity is Power.

A philosophical essay — outside the robotics-PM frame. Seven movements on power, nearness, and the quiet architecture of a life, from Aristotle's polis to the panopticon. Proximity is not power as such. Proximity is leverage.

9 min read · 6 illustrations · Read the essay →

05 Drafting

Technical credibility is a PM superpower.

Why being able to read a ROS log changes the kind of PM you become — and the kind of decisions your engineering team trusts you to make. Receipts from four years on the floor at Flo Mobility and Botsync.

Est. read · 06 min · Targeting · June 2026 · Notify me when it ships →

06 Drafting

What the factory floor teaches you about product decisions.

Notes from delivering at Ford Thailand, Caterpillar Singapore, and Coca-Cola India. The thing about product strategy is that it has to survive the plant floor — where a single miscalibrated sensor can halt a shift and your roadmap has to match what the customer is actually willing to accept on Day 1.