Why I Was Afraid to Share My Opinion

For most of my career, I kept my mouth shut.

Not because I didn’t have opinions. I had plenty. I just didn’t think anyone needed to hear them. I was the person behind the scenes, building products, redesigning funnels, shipping features, helping companies figure out what to build and how to build it. I got internal credit. Clients told me I changed the trajectory of their business. But none of that was public. None of it was on the record.

I watched other people in the startup world share their thinking online. Sometimes I’d read something and think, “That’s smart, I should try that.” But over the past few years, something shifted. I started reading the same advice and thinking, “I remember when I used to think that way. And then I learned there’s a better way to do it.”

That’s when I realized I might actually have something worth saying.

Confidence comes from reps, not from reading

You can’t shortcut experience. You can read every book on product strategy and startup growth and still not know what you’re doing when you’re sitting across from a founder who has six months of runway and a product that doesn’t convert.

I know what I know because I’ve done the work. And not just at a handful of companies. I’ve freelanced extensively, worked with hundreds of clients, and at one point worked inside a media conglomerate that operated across 22 different industries: agriculture, natural foods, manufacturing, waste management, finance, and more. I was in a shared services organization, which meant I touched all of those brands. Fintech, edtech, hospitality, logistics, construction, fashion, real estate. B2B and consumer. Startups with three people and enterprises with thousands.

That breadth matters. Most people find a niche and stay there. Someone in finance stays in finance. They might move companies, but they’re always operating through the same lens. And even when people do switch industries, they usually stay focused on their core discipline. A marketer moving from fintech to healthcare is still primarily thinking about marketing. They’ll learn enough about the industry to do their job, but they’re not going deep on how the users actually work.

Design forced me to go deeper. When you’re a product designer, especially in B2B, you can’t just get a surface-level understanding of the industry and start making screens. You have to intimately understand the people you’re designing for: their daily work, their frustrations, the way they think about their jobs. You have to dig until you truly understand their problems, because that’s the only way to solve them well. That’s what creates value in software.

So every time I switched industries, I wasn’t just changing companies. I was immersing myself in a completely different world of users and problems. Construction equipment operators, special education teachers, vacation rental managers, retail investors, logistics coordinators. For each one, I had to understand their work deeply enough to design solutions that actually fit their lives.

After 25 years of doing that across dozens of industries, the pattern library in my head is just bigger than most people’s. Not because I’m smarter, but because design forced me to learn more broadly and more deeply every time I made a switch.

It’s not just the industries, either. I speak French and Spanish, I’ve traveled to over 50 countries, and I spent four years as a digital nomad working remotely for startups while traveling with my family. All of that diversity of experience helps you do the thing that’s hardest in product work: stepping outside yourself. Staying objective, seeing problems from angles you wouldn’t see if you’d spent your whole life in one place. The more different cultures you experience, the more different people you meet, the easier it gets to look at a problem from the outside in instead of projecting your own assumptions onto it.

And then there’s being a founder. You can consult for startups all day long, but until you’ve put your own money into building a product, bootstrapped it, and lived with the consequences of every decision, you’re operating with a different mentality. When it’s your money and your time and there’s no safety net, you develop a sense for what matters and what doesn’t that you just can’t get any other way. That experience changed how I think about everything.

The thing that makes me different

Most people in the startup advisory world come from one discipline. They’re a marketer, or a product manager, or an engineer, or a strategist. They’re deep in one area.

I run the full gamut. I’ve done top-of-funnel branding and go-to-market strategy. I’ve built landing pages and run ad campaigns. I’ve designed social content. I’ve built and optimized onboarding funnels. I’ve done the UX research, the user interviews, the journey mapping. I’ve designed every screen in Figma, going all the way back to when we did this work in Photoshop. I’ve built and led design teams. I’ve managed engineering teams. I’ve written code in PHP, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, enough to understand architecture and scope even if I’m not writing production code every day.

That combination is rare. When I’m in a room with executives brainstorming features, most of the time the call ends with nobody having any idea whether what they just discussed is a three-week project or a three-month project. I usually know. Not down to the hour, but I can tell you the general size, what to cut, what to keep, and what order to build it in. That’s not a design skill or an engineering skill. It’s a pattern recognition skill that comes from doing all of it, across a lot of different companies and industries.

Why now

I’m not regurgitating something I read in a book anymore. I’m speaking from having executed these things at companies that have been successful. I’ve watched what works and what doesn’t, across enough contexts to know the difference between a principle and a coincidence.

Someone might criticize what I write here. That’s fine. I’m speaking from experience, and I’m comfortable addressing criticism, absorbing it, or just ignoring it. The point is that I’ve reached a place where I trust my own judgment, and I think the people I can help deserve to hear it.

So here I am. Putting my thinking on the record for the first time in 25 years.

Better late than never.