About Distinctions
I’ve spent over 25 years in enterprise technology. Today I’m a Senior Customer Solutions Manager at AWS, helping large organizations actually adopt the tools everyone tells them they need, and I teach AI strategy and analytics at Florida International University. Along the way, I earned a doctorate studying what makes software teams thrive, and trained as a coach for the people living through the change.
Before AWS, I was a Product Manager at Google, building AI products that used data to power the company’s own sales teams, an effort called Sales Intelligence, back when putting “AI” and “product” in the same sentence still turned heads. (It won a Google Innovation Award, which I’m still slightly amazed by.) Earlier I managed products at Sony and spent time in consulting. The thread never changed: technology meeting the messy reality of how people and organizations actually work.
That’s given me an unusual vantage point. I’ve watched AI go from a curiosity to the force reshaping how work gets done, and I’ve watched it from three sides at once: inside the enterprise, inside the research, and inside the room with the people trying to reinvent themselves around it. Most people writing about this have one of those views. I keep ending up with all three.
Distinctions is where I think out loud about what that actually looks like.
The name comes from my coaching work. A distinction is a new way of seeing: the thing that lets you notice, and then redesign, a system you’d been living inside without question. That’s the whole project here: handing you distinctions for the systems we inherited by default. How work is organized. How we adopt technology. How we run ourselves.
Not the conference-talk version. The real one, the ideas that held up, the ones that didn’t, the things I couldn’t stop thinking about. Some weeks it’s why a company’s AI rollout quietly failed. Some weeks it’s what it means to rebuild yourself at an inflection point. Same question at two heights: the organization and the person.
AI shows up constantly, because it’s the force pulling the old designs apart fastest right now. But it’s the lens, not the subject.
Two things to expect:
I write when the thinking is ready, not on a schedule. Your inbox won’t get crowded.
These are working ideas, not finished doctrine.
If a piece gives you a distinction you didn’t have that morning, it did its job.
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