Holding the whole in view.

Practice

I spent six years on a founding team, working between engineering, product, and business development. I was the person people came to when something wasn’t clicking, or when a difficult decision needed thinking through.

Working alongside exceptional specialists taught me how to ask questions when I wasn’t the expert, follow the technical detail, and recognise when individually sound answers weren’t adding up.

Sometimes that meant noticing that teams were building toward different things without realising it. Sometimes it meant thinking out loud with the founder, or keeping the whole product in view while everyone else was deep in their own discipline.

The other part of the work is direction: sensing where a product is soft before it shows up in the numbers, recognising which possibilities deserve attention and which are merely possible, and holding in view what the product should become—then working backwards from there into what to build now, what to leave out, and how the story holds together as the product changes.

Fingerspitzengefühl. A sensitivity that comes from years of paying close attention. It doesn’t make you infallible. It makes you less wrong, more often.