Adam Gonnerman

There we were, on a Zoom call, sharing our quarterly roadmap with leadership. The visuals were clean with dates, themes, milestones, and color coding. I think it's safe to say that the emotional effect of such a roadmap is a sense of alignment, clarity, and reduced anxiety. That's where there may be a problem. Roadmaps create psychological safety, but that safety can become an illusion of control.  Visual order reduces anxiety. We humans are social beings, and stories are core to our way of thinking about life. We prefer structured narratives over ambiguity. A roadmap, high level though it may be compared to a detailed project plan, turns uncertainty into a sequence. Having dates implies predictability, and sequencing implies causality.  Executives, for their part, want forward visibility. They want to see into the near- and mid-term future to the extent possible. Sales wants commitments that can be communicated and kept. Finance wants forecasting. Engineers look at the roadma...

Early in my career, I worked as a web producer at a startup, an experience I have written about before. It was a formative role that required wearing multiple hats and operating with a high degree of ownership. One of my primary responsibilities was receiving content from publishers and converting it into a format compatible with our online reader. The inputs varied widely. Investment newsletters arrived as emails, Word documents, PDFs, and in one case even by postal mail. Each format required a different workflow, and transforming them into publish-ready content demanded both technical adaptability and careful attention to detail. Although I could have managed most of the process from memory with minimal notes, I made a deliberate decision to fully document my work. I created step by step guides, including screenshots, and stored everything in Confluence. I also made sure my colleagues knew where to find it. My thinking was simple: if something unexpected happened, the business should...

For some time I've been thinking about my next academic move. While I have two Masters degrees, at some point in the future I'm going to want to complete a Doctorate in Business Administration. I've looked into a few options, but one from Edgewood University has stood out from the rest . Although it seems this program might be relatively new to the university, they have a great lineup of courses . And they are affordable, compared to other schools. You can complete your DBA for well under $25,000 according to what I've read.   Here are some quick facts about the school, via Wikipedia : Established: September 4, 1927 Religious affiliation: Catholic (Dominican) Endowment: $50 million President: Andrew P. Manion Academic staff: 150 Students: 2,469 (fall 2024) Undergraduates: 1,236 (fall 2024) Postgraduates : 1,233 (fall 2024) Location: Madison, Wisconsin Check out the video below and have a look at their website, if you're interested. I'm not saying this would d...

This video explores a provocative critique of Bitcoin, challenging common narratives about its independence and long term viability. It examines claims that Bitcoin’s price is deeply tied to government spending dynamics, questions whether its massive energy consumption poses an existential threat in a climate constrained world, and probes the sustainability of its speculative valuation structure. The discussion also raises concerns about regulation, financialization, and whether Bitcoin represents a true alternative to the traditional system or simply another chapter in the history of speculative bubbles.

Startups in their early days can be quite small. Just a handful of people wearing multiple hats, trying to reach a goal. That was the case in one startup I worked for very early in my career in business and technology. I had been hired to be customer service, but quickly found myself in the role of web producer. I was preparing and uploading content for the users, which was more complex that it sounds given the various formats that were delivered to me, and I was reporting bugs. Oddly enough, something we didn't have even post launch were "offline temporarily" and 404 pages, but no one on the team had time to create them. To be clear, as customer service, this shouldn't have been my responsibility.  The CEO noticed this gap, with the missing error pages, and pointed out that visitors hitting missing pages would encounter a confusing dead end. The urgency was clear, that these pages needed to be addressed immediately to maintain credibility and ensure a smooth experien...

My title right now, were I employed, could be "program manager," "project manager," "technical program manager," or technical project manager. Fundamentally, a project manager thinks about planning, organizing, and guiding work so that a specific goal is achieved on time, within scope, and within budget. Unlike operations work, projects have a beginning, middle, and an end. They come and go. Now, I have held other titles. Once, at Scholastic, I held the title of Senior Technical Product Manager. This was a role that blended the fields of project and product management. Despite this experience, there came a time that I wanted a clearer and more current understanding of how strong product managers operate day to day. For this, I arranged to shadow a product manager where I worked. At the time, this was more about curiosity and personal growth, rather than role transition. Now, though, I could see a time coming in which I would want to transition into product...

Early in my career, I was invited to sit in on a meeting with enterprise architects and senior engineers to discuss an integration between a legacy content management system and a new distribution platform. I was there as the (fairly junior) project manager, not the technical authority in the room. The conversation quickly became highly specialized: API contracts, data schemas, caching layers, and system latency thresholds. It was clear I wasn’t the deepest technical expert at the table, and for the first part of the discussion, I mostly listened and felt a little lost. What I began to notice, however, was that while the technical details were sound, the group was implicitly optimizing for architectural elegance rather than delivery timing. No one was explicitly mapping the proposed solution against the external deadline tied to a partner launch. I asked a clarifying question that went something like this (I may have actually rambled a bit): “If we implemented the simpler, interim int...