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.
Latest writing
A weekly change advisory board was built for a world of a few dozen changes a week. Agent-assisted delivery breaks that queue within months. Here is why CAB approval adds delay without adding safety, and how to rebuild change management as risk-tiered lanes, policy as code, and pipeline-generated evidence.
Every vendor in your stack can hit its SLA and your product can still miss its own. Composite availability multiplies across serial dependencies, and agentic AI workflows multiply it per run. Here is the math, the topology choices that change it, and the delivery practices that keep promises honest.
Agents did not make delivery unpredictable. They made your forecasting method visible. Point estimates and velocity assume a stable mean, and agentic work has a fat right tail. Here is why variance now dominates the plan, and the throughput, percentile, and Monte Carlo model that replaces story points.
Agents made writing code cheap, but proving it still needs somewhere to run. Environment provisioning and test data have quietly become the binding constraint on agentic delivery. Here is why shared pre-prod collapses under parallel agents, plus the environment tiers, test data strategy, and metrics that fix it.
The largest security decision your team made this quarter was probably an import line an AI agent wrote in milliseconds. This post shows delivery leaders how software supply chain risk changed when agents started choosing dependencies, and how to turn dependency provenance into a release gate your pipeline enforces.
My new book, Ace of Something: The Advantage of Being a Master of None, is out in paperback and on Kindle. It is a career memoir and a field guide for the person who was never the best at any one thing and ended up at the center of the work anyway.
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 5 — Live
Where value actually flows.
Episode 5: Context Is the Job. The context-engineering episode. Reliable AI agents fail on context, not prompts: what the model can actually see when it acts. A 2026 survey traced 57% of agent reliability failures to missing or inconsistent context, not the model. The context budget, the four failure modes, and how to run context like a delivery discipline. 22 minutes.
What people say
“Rick is a thought leader in SDLC processes and execution strategy — with rare big-picture and detail-oriented expertise. He has a unique ability to translate strategy into day-to-day delivery practice, and he's relentless about coaching others in agile best practices.”
Chris Katz — Colleague — 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.
