Notes from
the Workbench
A Year Into Consulting: What I Would Tell Myself at the Start
About a year ago I hung out my own shingle after two decades inside organizations. Some honest notes for anyone considering the same jump.
Read PostPrint Is Not Dead. Your Pipeline Might Be
Brochures, banners, and cards still close more trust than another social post. What has changed is how a modern team gets print done. Notes from rebuilding my print pipeline.
Read PostShipping a Website in a Week with AI in the Loop
Small-organization websites used to take months mostly because of waiting. With AI in the build loop, a week is realistic. Here is the shape of that week.
Read PostEmail Deliverability for Small Organizations: The Unglamorous Checklist
Your beautifully written email is worthless in a spam folder. The plumbing that keeps you out of it takes one afternoon and most small organizations never do it.
Read PostThe Room Is a Signal Chain
The most useful habit in AV work is refusing to see a room as equipment. See it as one continuous signal path and every mystery gets shorter.
Read PostBuilding a Card Game Taught Me More About Product Than Any Course
My side project is an original digital trading card game. It has quietly become the best product-management education I have ever received.
Read PostGetting a Team to Adopt AI Without the Eye Rolls
I have introduced AI workflows to staff and volunteer teams across several organizations. What worked, what flopped, and the one rule that changed everything.
Read PostI Automated My Content Calendar. Here Is What Broke
I run scheduled publishing pipelines across email, social, and community platforms. The failures taught me more than the successes. A field report.
Read PostDesign Tokens Are Not Just for Software
Software teams solved brand drift years ago with design tokens. Communications teams should steal the idea. One source of truth, from web to print to slides.
Read PostWhat No-Code App Builders Are Actually Good For
I have shipped real applications this year on AI-assisted app platforms, and hit their walls too. An honest map of where they shine and where they stop.
Read PostPrompt Systems, Not Prompts
The clever one-off prompt is a party trick. The prompt you version, test, and reuse across a whole team is an asset. Here is how I structure mine.
Read PostA Streaming Stack You Can Trust on a Budget
You do not need a broadcast truck to stream reliably. You need good audio, honest redundancy, and gear chosen for the operator you actually have.
Read PostAgents, Automations, and Knowing Which One You Need
Everything gets called an agent now. Most of what organizations need is not an agent at all. A field guide to picking the right tool for repeatable work.
Read PostDocumentation Your Volunteers Will Actually Use
Most AV documentation is written for the person who wrote it. Here is how I build runbooks that a nervous first-time volunteer can follow on a Sunday morning.
Read Post2025 Was the Year AI Became Infrastructure
Looking back at a year where AI stopped being a novelty in my work and started being plumbing. What changed, what I shipped with it, and what I expect next year.
Read PostLaunching a Brand from Zero: The First 30 Days
I just spent a month standing up a brand identity from nothing for a global organization. Here is the order of operations I followed and what I would repeat.
Read PostThree Frontier Models in One Month. Your Workflow Matters More
The big labs all shipped new flagship models within weeks of each other. Here is why I mostly did not care, and what I invest in instead of picking a team.
Read PostMCP: The Quiet Standard Making AI Actually Useful
A year ago Model Context Protocol was an announcement most people scrolled past. Now it is the reason my AI tools can touch my real systems. A plain-English explainer.
Read PostAI Video Is Here. What It Actually Changes for Small Teams
Generated video is suddenly everywhere in my feeds. Here is what I think it changes for small production teams, and the two things it does not touch at all.
Read PostWhat Twenty Years of Live Production Taught Me About Shipping
The livestream starts at 10:00 whether you are ready or not. That one constraint has shaped how I approach every project since, including the ones with no cameras in the room.
Read PostWelcome to the Blog
A first post to kick things off — what this space is for and what to expect.
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