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Business
My Business Paradigm
The purpose of a business is to maximize the conversion of realized customer value into cash flows (Maximize EV).
Using our value chain paradigm, here is how I walk that backwards:
The Goal: Maximize EV
Deliver value to customers
Everything exists in service of this.
requires
Product & Sales
Sales
Marketing, distribution, sales, and customer success are the lifeblood that keeps the business moving.
Product
The heart of the business. This is your right to exist in the market.
- Maintain current products
- Improve current products
- Increase output of current products
- Create net new products
requires
Operations
Manage and allocate resources
Capital, people, software, data, materials — the inputs that make product work possible.
Back-office teams exist to support those who create and deliver value. They are also the mechanisms responsible for converting customer value into revenue.
requires
Leadership
Facilitate and guide the entire chain
Managers and Executives are foundation resources for the company, providing direction and ensuring all the moving peices fit together.
Optimizing Value Chains
My primary paradigm for product is value chains. Everything is a process, each step in that process provides some incremental resource or value that gets used up chain, until ultimately, value is provided to the user.
Our goal as a business is to optimize that process for:
- Quality of value provided
- Efficiency of value creation
Each step provides incremental value up chain
And I often find that working the value chain backwards, starting at the target customer value, helps create effective and efficient solutions.
Discovering, Inventing, and De-risking Value Propositions
Marty Cagan and Teresa Torres articulate very well the importance of continual discovery habits and methodologies, dimensions of risk, and aligning customer and business needs.
The two points I like to emphasize are:
1
A/B testing is not a catch-all. I think too often PMs rely on throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. PMs carry the obligation to put in real cognitive work in thinking through problem spaces and ideating innovative or novel solutions.
2
There are many dimensions of risk, not just value risk. Legal risk, usability risk, technical feasibility risk, and many others are all things that a PM needs to address thoroughly.
I like building things:
Vango
A new full-stack Go web framework.
https://github.com/vango-go/vango*This website is a Vango app.
AI Agent Harness
An AI agent harness with a unique memory management system.
Private project
Claude Code Proxy (no longer maintainer)
A Cloudflare proxy server for using Claude Code with any model.
https://github.com/castari/castari-proxyAI Spreadsheet Builder
An AI-powered spreadsheet builder.
Private project
Financial Dashboard
Financial dashboard with QuickBooks and Plaid integrations.
Private project
I am now in tech, but I really value the time I spent in finance. I would boil all of corporate finance into two umbrella questions:
What is our revenue doing?
Do we believe our expense decisions align with what our revenue is doing?
From there we can analyze our revenue trends across many dimensions such as customer cohort, marketing channel, product, region, and more.
It is important to acknowledge that revenue is ultimately a lagging indicator of our product teams.
Our expenses are how we allocate resources into the value chains that earn the company money. It is important that each expense has a real thesis not just for existing, but also at the amount it exists.
- The Power of Habit — Charles Duhigg
- How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie
- The Happiness Advantage — Shawn Achor
- The Boys in the Boat — Daniel James Brown
- Deep Work — Cal Newport
- Getting Things Done — David Allen
- Mindset — Carol Dweck
- Drive — Daniel H. Pink
- Predictably Irrational — Dan Ariely
- The Gifts of Imperfection — Brene Brown
Personal
About Me
I really enjoy art, rock climbing, running, and cooking.
Blog
Writing
Quick, handwritten posts about various topics. 0% AI written.