Adam Gonnerman

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” - Michael Porter It's a familiar event to anyone who has worked with a tech team. You have work well along on a project when a stakeholder comes along asking for "just one more feature." If you are the project manager or product manager, people will look to you for guidance. You know that capacity is full, tradeoffs are real, the roadmap will bend, and something inevitably will break. Yet, the pressure is subtle (or non-so-subtle, depending on the stakeholder). There's an expectation, perhaps, that you'll say that the team can make it work, suggest that all are aligned, and acknowledge that this is an important feature. So, you say "yes." Six weeks or less later, you find that delivery slips, quality drops, morale dips, and trust is now eroded. Leadership is not only about what you drive forward. It’s about what you refuse to absorb. We need to be clear that saying "no" is not obstruction....

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” - Benjamin Franklin In startup and tech culture, we celebrate the last-minute save. But heroics are often symptoms of earlier neglect. Hero Culture thrives on moments like this: it's Friday at 4:47pm, a ticket has been sitting in review for two weeks, the stakeholder is impatient, and the engineer has a flight to catch, so someone pushes the deployment button because it's a small change and it's always fine. By 9pm there's a Slack thread, by 10pm it's a call, the engineer is somewhere over Ohio in airplane mode, and the one person who knows that part of the codebase is stepping outside a birthday dinner every fifteen minutes to check their phone. The fix takes forty minutes, the post-mortem takes two weeks, and the person who stayed up to save the night gets praised on Monday morning while the person who warned against Friday deployments three sprints ago is quietly forgotten. That's the thing about Hero Cult...

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” -  Warren Buffett One consistent truth I have observed in business is that leaders tend to reward what is visible, while some of the most essential work within organizations remains unseen. Consider a product launch. Slack channels fill with celebration, leadership offers public praise, and performance metrics are widely shared. Now contrast that with months of refactoring, quiet mentoring, and diligent risk mitigation that largely go unnoticed. Visibility distorts perception. This is visibility bias in action. It appears as: Shipping rewarded more than stabilizing. Roadmaps praised more than operational rigor. Deck-building valued over difficult conversations. Activity mistaken for impact. This connects directly to a post I previously wrote on shipping versus advancing , where I argued that organizations often conflate visible activity with meaningful progress. Shipping, with releases, tickets, a...

“You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.” - Henry Ford Many years ago I told someone that my wife at the time and I were planning on adopting a child at some point in the future. To my dismay, the response was “congratulations!” As if I had already adopted a child. The person went on to say what good people we were. Receiving such praise did not feel gratifying. It felt misplaced. Almost like a “stolen valor” situation. After that I kept to myself our plans to adopt, and as it turned out the only child I ever adopted was my beloved step-daughter. The other day I wrote a blog post that I’d hesitated about quite a bit. It was regarding the DBA program at Edgewood University. On the one hand, I was excited to share a program that I’d found to be so affordable and complete, and from a good (albeit small) university. On the other, I dreaded the possibility of giving the appearance of one trying to take credit for what he has not yet done. There is an emotional tensio...

“ All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward .” — Ellen Glasgow One day I was at the neighbor's house, hanging out with friends, when I noticed a calendar with a quote for each month. Paging through it, I came across the one above. It impacted me deeply at the time, as it aligned with what I often felt I saw in the world. Movement without progress. As the years have passed the quote has stayed with me, and its meaning to me has evolved as I've progressed through my career. I can see that in today's business culture, we often confuse activity with achievement. Let's consider the differences between shipping and advancing. "Shipping" means delivering something, releasing a feature, completing a sprint, publishing a post, or closing a ticket. Shipping is visible. It feels productive. It checks a box. Advancing, on the other hand, means moving closer to a meaningful objective. It's creating durable value. Improving systems and not just outputs....

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...

In a few blog posts here recently I've attempted to share what we can expect with the coming burst of the AI bubble . I think it's a matter of "when," not "if." The clip below explains the consequences of the end of the AI bubble in simple and direct terms. What bothers me about it, besides its inevitability, is that I can't think of what to do to protect myself from the aftermath.   

The most interesting concept I’ve learned about in the past month is “enshittification,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow . He uses it to describe the predictable decline of digital platforms: first they are great to users, then they shift to favor business customers and advertisers, and finally they extract maximum value for shareholders, often degrading the experience for everyone else in the process. The term is blunt, but the framework is sharp. It gave language to something I’ve observed repeatedly in media and technology organizations: product decisions that begin as user-centered gradually become revenue-optimized, and eventually erode trust, quality, and long-term viability. Related to that, I’ve been following Doctorow’s arguments about a potential AI bubble, his view that massive capital is flowing into AI in ways that may not be sustainable relative to real, durable value creation. That perspective helped me separate two things that are often conflated: genuine technological...

 About eleven years ago, I read a book on Positive Psychology that, at the time, had nothing to do with program management or technology delivery. One idea in particular stayed with me: the notion that some people are simply born more prone to depression, that they “did not win the cerebral cortex lottery.” The framing was direct and compassionate. It suggested that for many individuals, depression is not a failure of discipline, mindset, or effort, but a biological predisposition shaped by genetics and brain chemistry. That insight fundamentally changed how I viewed both mental health and human performance. Professionally, it shifted how I interpreted behavior on teams. Before that, I might have unconsciously attributed low energy, pessimism, or withdrawal to disengagement or attitude. Afterward, I became far more careful about separating observable outcomes from assumed intent. I learned to ask more questions, create psychological safety in one-on-ones, and normalize conversatio...

In May 2020, I founded Uberlândia Development Initiatives (UDI) to support the community of Shopping Park in Uberlândia, Brazil—an under-resourced neighborhood of roughly 40,000 residents in a city of more than 680,000. While Uberlândia is a regional hub with a strong university system, public transportation, and economic opportunity, Shopping Park developed for decades without consistent access to basic infrastructure such as sanitation, asphalt, and nearby services. I was particularly moved by the work of Centro de Formação Comunitário São Francisco de Assis (Estação Vida), a community center serving more than 150 children daily with meals, tutoring, sports, music, and life-enriching programming. I established UDI to raise the center’s profile internationally and create a secure, structured way for supporters in the United States and beyond to contribute. I dedicated significant time to forming the nonprofit, navigating the legal process to obtain 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in Dece...

Once when I was in a role supporting a multi-market digital release I was facilitating a meeting that had quickly become circular and unproductive. Engineering was discussing technical dependencies, product was focused on feature completeness, and regional stakeholders were raising compliance concerns. All of this was being discussed at the same time, with people occasionally talking over one another. Each group was using different terminology and optimizing for different risks, which made it difficult to determine what decision actually needed to be made. The conversation kept expanding instead of converging. What to do? I paused the discussion and reframed the session around three concrete questions: What decision are we making today? What constraints are non-negotiable? What options are truly on the table? I then captured each group’s concerns in plain language on a shared Google document, grouping them under timeline, compliance, and technical risk. This structure made overlaps a...

The following is the minimalist RPG system I discussed in my post yesterday. My teammate in creating this was named Maria, per her email address, but I don't have her last name. If that ever becomes available, I'll update it here. 

While pursuing my Master’s degree at Salve Regina University , I collaborated with a fellow student on a class project to design a minimalist tabletop role-playing game. Role-playing games (RPGs) are collaborative storytelling games in which players take on fictional characters in a shared world. One participant—often called the Game Master—describes the setting and challenges, while the other players declare what their characters attempt to do. Outcomes are typically determined by simple rules and dice rolls, blending imagination, strategy, and chance. Our goal was to create a system simple enough for beginners but structured enough to feel meaningful. I initially sketched a rules framework built around four core attributes—Strength, Agility, Intelligence, and Charisma—using a single six-sided die to resolve actions. Players would choose streamlined classes like Warrior, Mage, Rogue, or Healer, each interacting differently with combat and problem-solving. The system emphasized fast e...

When most people think about operating systems, they picture the old desktop rivalry between Windows and Mac. But this video looks beyond that familiar battle to tell a different story—one about a quiet contender that reshaped the digital world from behind the scenes. It begins with a hobby project in 1991 and traces how an open-source experiment, rooted in the Unix tradition, began spreading in unexpected places. Without dominating the desktop spotlight, it steadily found its way into the infrastructure that powers the internet, mobile devices, and far more than most people realize. Rather than focusing on who “won” the visible war, the video invites viewers to reconsider what winning actually means—and to discover how the software you rarely see may be running more of the world than you ever imagined.

When we think about modern finance, we picture sleek apps, real time payments, and cloud infrastructure humming in the background. What we rarely picture is the decades old code quietly processing trillions of dollars every day. This video pulls back the curtain on the surprising reality that much of global banking still runs on COBOL, a programming language built for precision and reliability long before most modern developers were born. It explores why banks continue to trust COBOL for mission critical systems, how an aging workforce has created what some call the Greybeard Crisis, and whether artificial intelligence can realistically step in to maintain or modernize the backbone of the financial system. Beneath the surface of innovation lies a fragile stability, and understanding that tension is essential to understanding the hidden risks inside global finance today.

Several years back I was in a program role supporting high-visibility digital platform launches. As usual for such a role, I was responsible for driving an on-time release tied to contractual distribution milestones. Meanwhile, a senior engineer was focused on refactoring part of the integration layer to improve long-term maintainability. We were seemingly at cross-purposes, because my goal was to schedule adherence and certification readiness, and the senior engineer was technical sustainability and reducing future defects. These priorities seemed to be in tension, as deeper refactoring risked delaying launch. How could we move forward? Thinking it through, I decided that instead of forcing a trade-off, I would facilitate a working session to break the work into phases. That is, we would identify what refactoring was critical for launch stability versus what could be sequenced into a fast-follow release. Through this process we aligned on a minimal, high impact improvement set that re...

The AI boom has sent tech stocks soaring, with Nvidia and the Magnificent 7 capturing the imagination of investors worldwide — but what if the entire rally rests on a foundation far more fragile than anyone is talking about? In this video, we pull back the curtain on a single, largely overlooked vulnerability hiding at the heart of the AI supply chain: a geographic and industrial bottleneck so concentrated that one geopolitical flashpoint could send shockwaves through every major tech company on the planet. Before you buy into the AI narrative, there's something you need to understand.

Behind the headlines celebrating the AI revolution lies a financial story that isn't nearly as clean as the press releases suggest. Trillions of dollars in debt, underwhelming adoption numbers, and a revenue loop that may be more circular than it first appears — this video takes a hard look at whether the AI boom is built on solid ground or something far more precarious. If you think the biggest risk to your portfolio is missing out on AI, you might want to watch this first.

The AI boom hasn't just captured investor imagination. It has quietly become one of the biggest concentrations of financial risk in modern history. In this video, we dig into the economic mechanics that most coverage glosses over: a business model that may actually lose more money as it scales, a web of capital flows that can look like growth while cycling through the same handful of players, and a market so top-heavy that a single crack could become a systemic fracture. The technology may be real, but the economics deserve a much harder look.

The AI story has moved well beyond Silicon Valley hype. It has become a question of market structure, systemic risk, and who actually holds power in the global economy. In this video, we look at why this boom may be unlike any speculative cycle before it, not because the technology isn't real, but because it has embedded itself so deeply into critical systems that a correction wouldn't stay contained. For executives and investors still treating AI purely as an opportunity, this one is worth your full attention.

The debate around AI and jobs tends to focus on robots taking over, but the more unsettling story is quieter and already underway. In this video, we examine what's actually happening to the workforce beneath the headlines: not mass layoffs, but something that may be harder to reverse. If you're early in your career, managing a team, or just trying to understand where the economy is actually headed, this one cuts closer to home than most AI coverage does.

The conversation around AI tends to treat it as a force of nature, something arriving whether we want it or not. This video pushes back on that framing. What if the way AI is actually being deployed has less to do with innovation and more to do with a very old corporate playbook? Behind the language of transformation and inevitability, there are specific choices being made by specific people, and those choices are worth naming clearly. If you've ever felt like the AI story doesn't quite add up, this might be why.

The AI hype cycle is loud, but the numbers behind it tell a quieter and more troubling story. In this video, we look at the growing gap between what the industry is promising and what it is actually delivering, from the economics that get worse as they scale to the valuations that depend on growth that may never arrive. It's not a reason to give up on technology, but it might be a reason to stop taking the headlines at face value.

Most of us have noticed it, that creeping sense that the internet just isn't as good as it used to be. But frustration doesn't explain why it happened or who's responsible. In this video, we get into the real mechanics behind the decline of platforms we once relied on, and why the answer isn't to find a better app. If you've ever wondered whether any of this can actually be fixed, the argument here might surprise you.

The deal that was made with an entire generation, work hard, get a degree, and a career will follow, is quietly falling apart. In this video, we look at what the data actually shows about young workers entering the labor market today, how AI is reshaping who gets hired and who gets left out, and why the old playbook no longer works the way anyone promised it would. If you're early in your career, raising someone who is, or trying to understand where the economy is actually headed, this one is worth watching.

AI is making organizations look more efficient than ever, but there is a cost that isn't showing up on any balance sheet yet. In this video, we examine what happens when companies optimize so aggressively for short-term output that they quietly eliminate the conditions that produce future expertise. The talent pipeline doesn't break all at once. It erodes, and by the time the problem becomes visible, rebuilding it is far harder than it would have been to protect it.

AI adoption in engineering is nearly universal, but the productivity story being told to investors and the one unfolding inside engineering teams are starting to diverge in some uncomfortable ways. In this video, we look at what the research actually shows about AI-generated code, where the hidden costs are accumulating, and why the organizations moving fastest may be building up a problem they won't fully feel until it's expensive to fix.