Communication is a risk management function. It just shouldn't act like one.
Comms should understand every reason not to say something, then have the balls to say something anyway.
mikaelOS
field notes / project lab
Writing
Essays, technical notes, lab journals and working papers from the MikaelOS project.
Heretical thoughts on sales
You probably don't need the deck. You do need to know why you're in the room, where the money is and when to shut up.
The tragic tale of the common marketer
Wanted: one person to do everything marketing has accumulated over the past twenty years. Actual job: figure out which three things matter and get them done.
Fuck the funnel. It’s a pipe.
People don’t buy the way our funnels say they do. Marketing and sales are just working on the same irrational primate at different distances from the money.
There are situations where you should rebrand. Almost none of them are yours.
The honest answer to "should we rebrand" pays worse than the answer everyone wants to hear.
The deterministic illusion of digital marketing
A dashboard can only show you what it was built to count. Everything that actually moves a market lives somewhere else.
Copy what everyone does badly, not what everyone does well
Benchmarking makes you a slightly worse copy of your competitor. Reverse benchmarking is the only shortcut to actually being interesting.
I hate bad service design
Every one of these systems was built to save the company money. Every one of them spends your time instead, and calls it progress.
You're allowed to succeed. You're just not allowed to be seen trying.
Effort is the part of success nobody wants to watch, and the only part anyone could actually learn from.
AI didn't make companies stupid. It just stopped hiding it.
When the easy version of everything becomes free, the only thing left worth paying for is the hard version.
What a personality test told me about myself, and what it told me about the company
A "science-based" assessment handed you back a version of yourself in four colour-coded categories. The interesting part isn't whether it's accurate. It's what the company needed it to say.
So many options, so little time
StrategyCanvas has reached the dangerous stage of a software project: almost everything feels possible
A man who screams at ads
I scream at ads.Which is slightly problematic because I'm a copywriter.
Progress, not perfection
I do too many things, so I stopped trying to finish something every day. Sometimes progress is just kicking the can a little further down the road.
AI makes coding faster. It does not make projects predictable.
When I started building Memstory, I thought I had a reasonably good idea of what I was getting into.
In a world of glut, craft is king
For a long time, quality was the floor. Now it is becoming the ceiling.
Small scale gardening and the art of local technology
In a world obsessed with global logistics and frictionless convenience, we have collectively misplaced our sense of agency.
Marketing: A Love-Hate Affair
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that only comes from loving something that keeps disappointing you. Marketing, for me, has been that thing.
The mind of a beginner is great
Because only afterwards do you know what it actually takes.
Why the world needs another language app
Most apps help people study language. Few help people enjoy books, podcasts, audiobooks and games in it as quickly as possible.
Elements of an awesome personal brand website
Most personal brand websites are glorified business cards. They contain a portrait, a short biography, a résumé and perhaps a few selected projects. They look polished, but they rarely leave …
My next application: Building the language learning tool I actually want to use
For years I have studied languages in a way that will be familiar to many serious learners: textbooks, notebooks, grammar tables, flashcards, audio courses and countless partially completed apps. Some …
What I believe in
I believe that the most meaningful work happens at the intersection of vision, craftsmanship and execution.
Thought leadership is (mostly) bullshit
Thought leadership is a relatively new corporate buzzword for an idea as old as commerce itself.
The tension of a creative playing software engineer
Or perhaps the software engineer was there all along
Open systems, European infrastructure and the quiet pleasure of building on your own terms
One of the more curious developments in modern software is that many organizations now build critical systems on foundations they do not fully understand, cannot meaningfully inspect and, in some …
Part 5 — The brand going forward
The most useful realization is that my professional identity does not need to be reduced to a conventional category.
Part 4 — Building the machine that explains the builder
The project began as a relatively conventional portfolio rebuild.
Part 3 — Personal branding as systems design
For years, personal branding felt vaguely artificial.
Part 2 — The polyglot, the generalist and the mad scientist
There is a particular expression people sometimes notice when discussing a sufficiently interesting problem. The eyes sharpen. Speech accelerates. Whiteboards begin to fill with improbable connections between organizational design, user …
Part 1 — The problem with being difficult to categorize
For most of my career, the central professional problem has not been a lack of capability. It has been a surplus of capabilities that do not fit neatly into a …