Rick's leadership expertise focuses on effectively guiding organizations toward the successful realization of their objectives. From transformation strategy to delivery at scale, product operating models and agentic AI.
Dr. of Business Administration DBA · MBA · SA · A-CSM
Transformation · Delivery · Product · AI
Work with Rick
Short-term engagements, fractional leadership, and workshop intensives. Pittsburgh-based, remote-friendly.
Out now on Amazon®
More Clarity, Less Noise
by Rick Pollick
Two volumes — writings on mindset, people, process, product, data, and AI.
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Latest writing
Prompt engineering was never the real bottleneck. In production, agentic AI systems fail on context: what the model can actually see when it acts. Here is why context engineering is a delivery discipline, not a research problem, and how to run it with ownership, evals, and observability.
For a decade we optimized mean time to resolve. Now agentic AI detects and remediates in seconds, so the real constraint in incident response is comprehension. Here is why delivery teams need a new metric, mean time to understand, and an operating model built around it.
The production-gap episode of Valuestream. Most enterprise AI pilots don't fail on the model; they stall in the delivery and operating work between a dazzling demo and a system that survives production. The four layers of the gap: verification, evaluation, operability, and ownership, plus the one stalled pilot you can move this week.
AI made your team ship code faster; the 2025 DORA data shows it also made delivery less stable. Progressive delivery gives AI-era teams a control plane of canary releases, feature flags, and automated rollback wired to your error budget, so you ship fast without shipping chaos to production.
Agentic coding tools made writing code nearly free, but every change still has to pass through one serialized gate to reach production. This is a practical guide to treating the merge queue as the real critical path, sizing it, and keeping green main from becoming your delivery ceiling.
Sam Altman declared we have crossed the event horizon into the singularity. Dario Amodei expects Nobel-caliber AI by 2027. $690 billion in AI infrastructure spending is committed for 2026 alone. Here is what the AGI declarations, the rhetoric shifts, and the capital flows actually mean for leaders building products and running delivery programs right now.
Apps
Built to make delivery, operations, and everyday life a little less boring.
Ezra
Design custom QR codes and get deep analytics — cheap.
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Football FantasyIQ
A full platform for fantasy-football insight — trends, projections, matchup intelligence, powered by the Sleeper API.
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AltaClario
Modern agile analytics for Jira & Azure DevOps — burndown, velocity, capacity, and release health in one workspace.
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Vantage
Gather every loyalty balance you have — value it all and turn it into trips.
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Overtone
Records all audio input and output with free transcription, summaries, and sharing — Mac and Windows today, iOS and Android coming.
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ShadoWatchr
Mac threat assessments and active defense in one place.
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Episode 4 — Live
Where value actually flows.
Episode 4: The Demo Isn't the Deliverable. The production-gap episode. Most enterprise AI pilots don't fail on the model. They stall in the delivery and operating work between a demo that dazzles and a system that survives production. The four layers of the gap, verification, evaluation, operability, and ownership, plus the one stalled pilot you can move this week. 23 minutes.
What people say
“Rick is dynamic, thoughtful, energetic, inventive, inspirational, articulate, consultative, and driven. He excels at breaking down complex challenges, driving transformation, and building team capability through innovative problem-solving.”
Mark Wuslich — Colleague - Product Manager & Scrum Master — UPMC Enterprises
Elsewhere
Select Technical Projects
Open-source code and experiments on GitHub.
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Linktree
Everywhere else to find Rick.
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Pittsburgh Technology Council
Regional tech community and programming.
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ProductTank Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh's product community — meetups, talks, and demos for PMs and product-minded folks.
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#PittAgile Meetup
Pittsburgh's local agile practitioner community.
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Portfolio Video
A short walkthrough of delivery leadership work.
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Get in touch
Advisory, fractional leadership, AI strategy, or just a coffee chat. Book a 30-minute slot, drop an email, or grab the resume.
