Why I Write This

Most writing about innovation falls into one of two traps.

The first is inspiration porn — sweeping declarations about thinking bigger, moving faster, and disrupting yourself before someone disrupts you. Energizing for about forty minutes. Useless on a Monday morning.

The second is framework soup — nested matrices, innovation funnels, and stage-gate processes that look great in a deck and die the moment they meet a real team with real constraints and a roadmap that’s already three months behind.

I write this because I’ve lived inside both traps. And I’ve spent 16 years figuring out what actually works.

The Thesis

Here’s what I believe, and what this newsletter is about:

Innovation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is a deliberate, intentional act.

Companies don’t innovate by accident. Teams don’t build breakthroughs by hoping inspiration strikes. The organizations that consistently create new things — new products, new categories, new ways of operating — have built systems, cultures, and habits that make innovation repeatable.

I call the moment a company deliberately chooses to adapt and invent rather than coast and decline an Innovation Pivot. And I believe you can learn how to engineer one.

That’s what I write about here. Every week.

Who I Am

I’m a product leader who has spent a career at the edge of what’s possible — building things that didn’t exist yet, at companies that were trying to invent the future.

At Palm, I led a cross-disciplinary team building prototypes with capacitive touch screens, NFC payments, and inductive charging — years before the iPhone. Some of it shipped. Some of it became the Android ecosystem without us. All of it taught me what great innovation teams actually look like from the inside.

At Google, I helped define a new product category that became Chromecast — the fastest-selling media device in the US at the time. I learned how to take a half-baked idea, strip it to its essential value, and scale it to millions of people fast.

At Google X, I helped build the moonshot factory — evaluating 30+ projects across AI, synthetic biology, giant airships, and more. I learned how to move from zero to one quickly, across any domain, with any set of partners, under conditions of radical uncertainty.

Back at Google, I launched Read Along — which required aligning five major partners: Google Assistant, Nest, Disney, Penguin Random House, and Walmart. We brought Assistant for Kids and Families from zero to 100 million users across 30 countries in two years. That one taught me everything about how innovation actually scales.

Most recently, I led Product for the Consumer Experience at VRChat — a social platform built around real-time human connection at a moment when loneliness is one of the defining crises of our time. I learned how to build for identity, belonging, and expression across mobile, desktop, and VR simultaneously. Harder than it sounds. More meaningful than most product problems I've tackled.

Along the way I built teams, designed org structures, ran workshops on strategy and decision-making, and watched firsthand which cultures create breakthroughs — and which ones suffocate good ideas before they ever see daylight.

More on me here.

What You’ll Find

Innovation Blueprints — The frameworks, systems, and team habits that make innovation repeatable. How to structure decisions, build trust, run strategy, and design org cultures that actually ship new things. This is the how.

Unsolicited Advice — Uninvited innovation pivot strategies for well-known companies. No insider information, no NDAs — just rigorous strategic thinking applied publicly to real businesses. This is the proof of thinking.

Innovation Haiku — One innovation idea. Three lines. Because if you can’t say it simply, you don’t understand it yet.

Let’s Build Something

If you lead a product team and you’re tired of innovation theater — the offsites, the sticky notes, the frameworks that never stick — this is for you.

Subscribe below for a new piece every week. And if you want to talk strategy, partnerships, or what it actually takes to build an innovation culture from scratch, find me on LinkedIn.

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