Bringing me in to teach a partner program, a conference workshop or a course? The entries to forward are on Work.
Here’s what I teach, on one sheet. BobCo is a made-up company:
- STOP
- If we have to pull data from third-party sources to ship this, we scrap it and put the resources somewhere else.
- PIVOT
- If inference costs look set to blow the budget on release, we cut them before we ship, not after.
- INVEST
- If beta sign-ups come in at twice our projection, we make time to talk about expanding this.
I learned this by losing an argument. I once tried to talk a company out of an expensive AI practice that wasn’t working. I was right. The portfolio kept it anyway, and the teams around it starved.
Being right in the meeting didn’t fix it. Agreeing before the build does. Building is the cheap part now. The expensive part is the call: what would make this stop, pivot or invest? Write that down first, and nobody has to be brave later.
Here’s how I teach. This clip is from an online webinar I hosted in 2024. Watch the loop: I explain one idea, set a 5-minute exercise, then come back and push the room on what they wrote in chat.
Mike took an earlier session of mine on the stop, pivot and invest call:
I’ve been using the approach to talk about a particular pilot I’m engaging in with a start-up. I’ve been very clear that there is a difference between a pilot and an enterprise roll-out and that we need to determine what are the non-negotiable success criteria for our organization to make sure that we are fully aligned on whether we kill, pivot, or move forward.
Mike
I teach the call AI can’t make.
The class
My hands-on AI workshop has run for a corporate client through First Principles, and has no feedback to show yet. In 90 minutes, product managers build an AI assistant with Claude, then write its stop, pivot and invest statements. It also runs as a half day, online or in person.
Bring a laptop and a free Claude account. Newcomers warm up first by building a simple web page from worked examples.
Universities
I teach at MICA as Part-Time Faculty in the Product Management MPS, where I designed the Product Design and UX Capstone. At Columbia I was a Lecturer in the M.S. Technology Management, 2023–2024, where I designed and taught Technology Management and AI/ML.
At both schools: full 16-week terms, sections of up to 70, and I wrote the syllabi, graded and ran the LMS myself. My degree is a BS in Computer Science, and both schools appointed me to design courses for their master’s programs. I’m open to adjunct appointments from the next term, online or on campus.
Partners
First Principles brought me in to teach it. I’ve also run master classes for IxDF and a live session for O’Reilly.
Conferences
I’ve run a 320-person workshop at Mind the Product. I also gave a breakout at #mtpcon Digital 2020, “The Initiative Document”.
What I build
I’ve built internal agents on open-source models to make building cheaper: a nutrition assistant, deck builders, copy editors. I build with Claude too.
Read these first
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Is Your Product Strategy Still Working? Three Signs It's Dead
Before you can say stop, you have to prove it's over. Three signs that hold up in a room that doesn't want to hear them.
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Survival Metrics: How Product Teams Know When to Stop
Stop, pivot, invest, written down before the work starts. Then saying stop is just reading back what you agreed.
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Secrecy Culture vs Privacy Culture: Why It Matters for Product Teams
Nobody's hiding anything. They just learned what's safe to say. That's the difference between privacy and secrecy.