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.
Business Admin Doctoral Candidate · 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
DORA metrics defined modern software delivery for a decade. With agentic AI shipping code on its own, deployment frequency and lead time can lie to you. Here is the new metric stack engineering leaders actually need.
The launch episode of Valuestream. Nine senior people in a room, forty-five minutes blocked, one decision on the table, and nobody makes it. This is the quietest failure mode in modern delivery, and the three-word fix you can ship in a Google Sheet on Monday. Plus the operating model, platform engineering, and agentic AI layers that turn that one fix into real value flow. Full show notes, the framework, the data, and the Spotify embed.
My Product Camp Pittsburgh 2026 talk on the three quiet failure modes of matrixed organizations, the Owner-Decision-Date framework that fixes them, and the one-page decision-aging heatmap you can implement in a Google Sheet on Monday. Full recap, the artifact, the impact chart, and the deck as PPTX and PDF.
Agentic coding tools are refactoring services that humans spent years getting right, and most of them have no memory of why the original design existed. Architecture Decision Records were a tidy idea when humans wrote all the code; they are now load-bearing infrastructure for any team where an AI agent touches production. A practical playbook for the ADR discipline, the new metrics that matter, and the three failure modes to avoid.
Most project managers treat re-baselining as failure. The best ones treat it as the highest-value move available. A tactical playbook for when to call the reset, how to prepare the executive brief, the five-step conversation framework, and the new commitment statement template that holds. Includes three real-world cases and the post-meeting moves that turn a re-baseline into renewed credibility.
Modern project management is bilingual. Read an architecture decision record, reason about an error budget, and trace a CI dependency, or get pattern matched to the steering committee. A practitioner's guide to the five technical artifacts every PM should know, the dependency-graph critical path, technical risk frameworks, and the trust contract that earns engineering's respect.
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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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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PlacePin
Record where you've been, build custom lists, and share with friends — with AI to surface insight on each place, plan trips, and keep everything organized.
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Episode 1 — Live
Where value actually flows.
Episode 1: See It, Own It, Move It. The quietest failure mode in modern delivery, the three-word fix you can ship Monday, and the operating-model, platform, and agentic-AI layers that turn it into structural value flow. 25 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.
