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More Clarity, Less Noise
by Rick Pollick
Two volumes — writings on mindset, people, process, product, data, and AI.
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2026
20 minMembersVibe Coding with Precision
Defining Vibe Coding in My Daily WorkVibe coding, as I practice it, means describing software needs in conversational English, letting an AI like Claude or Grok generate the bulk of the code, and then refining through targeted follow ups rather than typing out every function myself.Andrej Karpathy captured the essence in his viral post: "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." (https://x
15 minMembersFrom Rough Starts to Real Progress
I Used to Think My Son Just Had a "Knack" for Baseball GamesWe were on the couch playing MLB The Show on PlayStation, and he was absolutely lighting me up. Home run after home run.Meanwhile, I was rolling over on sliders, chasing pitches in the dirt, and generally looking like someone who'd just picked up a controller for the first time. In real life, he's already a better baseball player than I ever was—more athletic, more fluid, more confident. Watching him mash in a game that mirrors the spor
13 minMembersDesign, Consistency & Complexity
Design, Consistency & Complexity: Keeping UX and Brand Intact as Products ScaleAs products grow up and get more complicated, keeping the design user-friendly and on‑brand stops being a "nice UI" problem and becomes a full‑on product strategy problem. You either get intentional about the experience end‑to‑end, or complexity quietly eats your UX, your brand, and eventually your numbers.In this post, we'll walk through what really happens to your product as it grows up: why consistency in UI and UX
23 minMembersFrom Projects --> One Product
Organizing multiple teams around one shared product works best when structure, cadence, and metrics all serve one thing: value moving reliably into the hands of real users. From “Projects” to One ProductWhen you spin up multiple (like Scrum) teams around closely related work, you either get a well‑orchestrated release train or a pile‑up of dependencies, rework, and half‑baked “Done.” The difference usually has less to do with how pretty your Jira board is and more to do with how you structure y
2025
14 minMembersGoing Off-Grid
There's a moment that hits a lot of people in fast1paced tech jobs. You're sitting in front of three monitors, eight Slackchannels are on fire, PagerDuty is glaring at you like a smoke alarm, and a totally reasonable thought pops into your head:"What if I just threw my phone in a lake and learned to whittle?"You're not broken. You're normal. And there's research behind that urge to go "low-tech" or even "off-grid" outside of work,especially around technostress, digital overload, and the way mode
20 minMembersMore Clarity = Less Noise
When Vision is Clear, Less Micromanaging is Needed: The Truth Behind Trust, Alignment, and Empowered TeamsLook, we've all been there. Sitting in yet another meeting that could've been an email, watching your day evaporate into a black hole of status updates and check-ins. Meanwhile, the actual work? It's piling up on your desk, waiting for you to finally get five uninterrupted minutes to tackle it.Here's the thing, though: when vision is clear, direction makes sense, and communication is good, l
15 minMembersDon't Fear the Bot
Don't Fear the Bot: Why AI Mastery is Your Next Essential Skill (And What Happens If You Ignore It)Remember hearing about when people thought electricity would kill them in their sleep?In the 1880s, when electric lights first flickered on in city streets, people called them "devil's fire" and "witch's light". Stories spread that spirits were trapped in wires, waiting to burst out as fire and death. The New York Tribune reported in 1889 that citizens genuinely believed that "any metallic object—a
8 minMembersBecause I Felt Like It
How I Turned Fantasy Football Into an AI-Powered Data Playground