Field Note
Internal Platforms need product managers, not priests
A platform team that rules by doctrine gets compliance. A platform team that runs like a product gets adoption. Only one of those is worth anything.
Topic
Data Platforms
The machinery that turns data from exhaust into operating leverage.
Field Note
The Platform Team as an Economic Function
A platform team is not a cost centre. It changes the marginal cost of safe change, and that is an economic argument, not a tooling one.
Field Note
How to evaluate platform engineering value
The value of a platform is not the tooling. It is the organisational friction it makes unnecessary. Platform engineering is easy to justify badly. A team builds an
Field Note
The Human in the loop is not a strategy
"Human oversight" is doing a lot of work in AI architecture diagrams. Too much, I think. It usually shows up as a reassuring little box near
Field Note
When the consumer is a machine
Event contracts used to be guidance. With agents on the other end, they're the thing the system actually runs on.
Field Note
Batch vs Streaming is the Wrong Data Architecture Question
The real architectural decision isn't how fast you process data. It's what you choose to treat as a fact, and whether the machines around it can reason about those facts without asking permission.
Field Note
Why the modern Data Platform is becoming an Operating System
Why it is no longer just infrastructure For a long time, the data platform was treated as a supporting layer. A place where data was collected, transformed, stored,