👋 About

I’m Michael — a product leader, continuous learner, and lifelong explorer of both technology and creativity. I help teams stay in sync, maintain sustainable workloads, and keep projects profitable. But that’s just one part of who I am.

This readme started as a document to help teammates understand how I work, but I’ve adapted it to share more broadly as part of my approach to building in public and connecting with others who share similar interests. Like me, it’s a continuous work-in-progress and reflects both my professional philosophy and personal values.

Whether you’re here to collaborate, learn, or just curious about how I think and work, I hope you’ll find something valuable. Have questions or see something missing? Don’t hesitate to reach out.

Last updated: April 2025

What I value most

These are the concepts I value most in professional collaboration.

• Trust by default:
  • When working with others, I believe in starting with trust. Everyone brings strong expertise and unique perspectives to the table. My intent is to support people in maximizing what they bring. However, trust can be lost when consistently damaged over time, requiring a need to earn it again.
• Ownership:
  • I believe in giving space for people to work in their own way. While I like to stay aware, I generally hold back from getting into others' work unless asked to contribute or if something seems to be falling to the wayside, in which case I’ll work to share feedback first. We all work and process things differently, and I don’t want to get in the way of that unless invited in.
• Authenticity:
  • Product is messy and hard. We’re all learning. If you try to cover this up, I will generally pick it up, diminishing the potential of our collaboration together.
• Consistency & fairness:
  • I believe being consistent, such as through process or questions I may ask, creates a healthy playing field. If I ever ask a question or direct attention to something that may be familiar, I’m just wanting to ensure everyone shares equally in this knowledge or intent.
• Life outside of work & family:
  • We all have other very large and significant parts of our lives we’re focused on, which may bring up unforeseen needs from time to time. I will always understand if someone has to make a last-minute change due to an unforeseen issue outside of work, such as unplanned childcare, an illness, or a family emergency.
• Open communication over private channels:
  • Share knowledge and perspectives freely. When sharing, I believe at the very least you’ll prompt considerations, discussion, and relationship-building, guiding toward opportunities that might not otherwise surface. More practically, while you may be working on something with just one other person, I believe in having discussions in open channels over private ones. The reason is that context may be invaluable to others, prompting value in tangential areas, or providing searchable context for the future.
• Brevity:
  • Being direct and to the point helps us all quickly learn and decide together. Context is important, but more so to support what’s being shared. Lead with the takeaway, not the details. To support brevity, if my responses are simple or minimal, it’s because I trust the other person’s perspective and don’t have anything to add at the moment.
• A personal drive to learn and grow:
  • Product today will not be how product is approached tomorrow. Something I enjoy so much about our industry is the ever-changing nature of our crafts. To understand this is to bring humility to our work, displayed through insatiable curiosity, and asking “why?” To do well with what we do, we have to learn together. My hope is that when people run into challenges, they get excited about learning how to solve them, figuring out what’s worked well and what could be, influenced by both internal and external influences.

Concepts I value in product

While not hard and fast perspectives, I tend to find myself generally defaulting to these.

• Passion for craft:
  • Whether it’s design, engineering, research, data, product management, or something else, a strong passion for your craft means what teams build together will ultimately be best-in-class.
• Great products are the result of great collaborations:
  • Share and share frequently. Collaborate across departments. Seek opinions. Debate. Refine. Sharpen. Products will only be as good as the cross-functional collaboration we allow ourselves to have and participate in.
• Taste:
  • I tend to gravitate towards products with a clear focus on strong product design but not just for the sake of design. Examples include Fantastical, Linear, Mela, Granola, and Float. I also believe the resources we seek out and follow to help grow in our crafts influence our taste in product, and what we bring to how we build.
• Exploration (and consistency):
  • I believe there’s immense value in looking outside the lines, even to areas that may not seem connected in any way to what we’re working on. Experimentation with new technologies. Exploration of new products. Asking “what if?” Sometimes, I’ve found this exploration time to be the most valuable thing we can do to unlock our minds and perspectives. Mindfully investing in this is also important: we don’t want to be reactive to whatever the shiny new thing is, but we also want to learn and apply from it by asking, “what if?”
• Lean teams can produce great products:
  • While I believe staffing up teams can bring opportunities smaller ones may struggle with, I also believe in not growing for growth’s sake. There are many examples of incredibly successful products that have been healthily crafted by small, intentional teams.
• Process is a guide, not the rule:
  • Process is valuable in guiding how we align shared time, approach opportunities, and ensures we’re considering the resources we have. When done best, I believe process is a bit like using bumpers in a bowling lane. When we throw the ball, we know where it has to go and that it will get there. How it gets there is up to us, with the bumpers providing an as-needed guide to help the ball down the lane.
• It depends:
  • Should we prioritize scoping a feature to get it out as quickly as possible? Should we make a feature the best experience possible? Should we go off-process for a key initiative? I believe the best answer is usually “it depends,” with the follow-up answer being the result of considering the context of the work and the big picture of strategy, mission, vision, and values.

How I tend to approach work

My own style of approaching work is simultaneously rooted in consistency and flexibility.

• I maintain regular working hours during the day with some ad-hoc evening availability. I’m an early riser and like to use my morning time to catch up on messages and do some reading, whether it’s articles in my Matter queue or a Kindle book. I try to get some exercise in during my workday.
• Over the years of reading books such as Getting Things Done, Make Time, and Deep Work, I’ve become a fan of time blocking. I find this helps me plan my weeks ahead, ensuring I’ve prioritized time to follow through on commitments or to intentionally invest in what’s next. To this end, I generally time block work from my personal task list on the Friday before the following week. I view these as flexible ‘Tetris blocks’ - if something comes up, I’m happy to flex. As part of this, I aim to keep most of my notification processing to my ‘Inboxes & Admin’ times to promote a focus on deep work.
• Outside of working hours, I prioritize personal time. This boundary is really important to me, and I anticipate the same is true for others. On the rare occasion I do spend time on work outside regular hours, the intent is not to set an example, but rather to lean into whatever personal flow has brought me to that point.
• I default to async communications (written, video messages, collaborative boards, etc.) because I believe it supports respect of our mutual time, priorities, and unique styles of how we each process and respond. That said, I will always be supportive of prioritizing other forms of communication to support different preferences.
• When meeting with others, you may often hear me asking “what’s on your mind?” The intent behind this question is to help guide our discussion, generally leading to the unpacking of a root challenge or opportunity we can work through together. I generally don’t believe status updates are a valuable use of meeting time, notably since there are other tools to discuss these. One-on-one time is an opportunity to dive into talking more about the work, not the work.
• I believe feedback is one of our most valuable tools and that it goes both ways. Feedback, positive or constructive, is equally valuable, as it allows us to calibrate with one another. I also believe feedback is only a perspective. If I share something, it is based on my limited context of what I perceive and my recommendation is to improve from it. You can take it, leave it, or perhaps best, make something unique of your own from it, considering my feedback as an ingredient for improvement. Notably, some of my best work is based on feedback I’ve received.

Strengths

These are areas where I believe I can add the most value in professional relationships:

• Systems thinking:
  • I gravitate towards thinking in systems, notably, how might something we’re building impact another area of the product or user segment, and might there be a connected opportunity there we should explore as part of this? I also bring this thinking mindset to how teams and companies work, particularly in how people best collaborate and learn together.
• Contextual learner:
  • I have a habit of seeking and skimming for context, so that I may have enough of a picture to guide forward. Among several examples, Stripe stands out as a company where just enough context plays a role in ‘shaping’ the work.
• Facilitation:
  • Pairing with my belief that we’re all experts in our crafts, I believe facilitation is a valuable tool to help guide sharing that expertise across teams, in ways that work for multiple personality types, so that we can move forward together. I’m happy to support others as a resource in playing the role of facilitator or providing guidance on developing facilitation approaches.
• StrengthsFinder Top 5 Strengths:
  • Futuristic
  • Input
  • Intellection
  • Restorative
  • Responsibility

Nuances

These are some areas of my personality that may feel a bit bumpy. Please bear with me.

• I work to be really intentional with my availability to support being both incredibly present professionally and personally. While I am certainly able to flex on this, please work with me to help ensure a balance between both. Life occasionally requires adjusting schedules due to personal commitments, and I may need to be more flexible with my availability on such days. Similarly, I completely understand and support others in navigating these more ‘gray’ areas of life as well.
• We’re all human and as such, there are days where I may show up with a full tank and others I don’t. If it’s a day where I don’t have a full tank, I’ll be working hard to not let it impact my contributions; please don’t take it personally if it does.
• I’m a processor and may need some time to think about a conversation, consider its context, impact, and more. I will follow up, but in particularly high-impact discussions, I want to ensure I allow my mind the space to provide due diligence.

Beyond Work

I believe what we do outside of work deeply influences how we think and create. The same curiosity that drives me in product development shows up in my personal interests:

• Photography: Equipped with my Fuji XT3, I explore the world through a different lens. There’s something about the process of composition and editing that feels surprisingly similar to product development – it’s all about finding the right balance and perspective.
• Reading & Stories: I’m an avid reader with a daily ritual of fiction before bed and non-fiction throughout the day. Science fiction holds a special place in my heart, both in books and shows. These stories often inspire how I think about future possibilities in technology and product development.
• Gaming & Tech: While I keep up with the latest in gaming technology and occasionally dive into new AAA titles, these days my gaming sessions often parallel with building LEGO sets with my kids. Our proudest achievement? The LEGO Artemis rocket standing proudly in my home office.
• Music: My playlist knows no boundaries – from classical to EDM to hard rock. This diversity in musical taste often reflects in my approach to problem-solving: there’s rarely just one right way to do things.

These interests might seem disconnected from product leadership, but they all feed into how I approach problems, think about user experiences, and find creative solutions. Whether it’s composing a photograph or architecting a product feature, it’s all about finding the right balance between technical excellence and human experience.