Personal Reflection

I'm working on making this little site my new home on the internet. It's been awhile since I felt compelled to put in the effort to build - and maintain - a presence on the web again. Over the past 15+ years I've poured a lot (too much) of my energy, time and attention into Twitter as my de facto home on the web and over the course of 2022 became increasingly disenchanted with that path so here we are. Back in the early aughts I used to regularly blog (go Waaayyyy Back: monoki.

(originally posted on Medium) The past year working at Nucleus has been an amazing experience for me. I joined the team in March of last year with the goal of having our product on store shelves the first week in August. After having worked at a hardware startup that sadly never made it to market, I was intimately aware of all the challenges that hardware companies face and I was determined to make sure we not only shipped but that the product experience was as simple and delightful as it could

(originally posted on Medium) After 9 great months working with many startups, I’m joining one. Over the past nine months I’ve been working as an independent product consultant, collaborating with companies in a variety of capacities — product design, product & company strategy, process & org design and a little bit of coaching along the way. Since June I’ve gotten to work closely with 10 companies and I’ve met with over 60. As I suspected, the variety that consulting offers has provided a gr

(originally posted on Medium) As 2015 came to an end, I realized I’ve been working as a consultant since June and I thought it would be useful for me (and hopefully others) to reflect on how it’s gone, what I’ve learned, what I’ve changed, now that I have a decent amount of time and data to look back on. Time is money. Plan accordingly. Time is everyone’s most valuable resource and while most people could benefit greatly from a more rigorous approach to time management, for the independent co

(originally posted on Medium) Back in May, after a little over a year, the company I’d been working with, Sum, closed its doors. The vision — to take wearables beyond data for data’s sake and empower people with the insight necessary to make meaningful improvements to their long term health — was a big swing in a space I cared deeply about. The opportunity to approach it as a designer was something I couldn’t pass up. As with all big swings, I knew there was a high chance of failure but pulli

(originally posted on Medium) A look back at 2014 and forward to 2015 Most years as December winds down, I resolve to change 5–10 things that fall roughly into the categories you’d expect: lose some weight, be more active, sleep better, read more, etc. Before articulating what I’m planning to work on this year, I wanted to look back at what I set out to do last year and see how I fared. I threw down some quick grades on the goals I’d laid out, OKR-style: * Sleep better (0.8) — Gone are the

(originally posted on Medium) Note: This post originally aired in February 2014 on Tumblr but was moved to Medium in October 2014. Over the past few months I’ve gotten to slow down a bit, spend some more time with my kids and enjoy a lot of coffees with a wide variety of people here in the city. The range of interesting new people I got to meet and projects I got to learn about was inspiring, particularly as lifelong New Yorker who cares deeply about continuing to grow the consumer product pre

Getting excited about the unknown 2013 was as eventful a year as I can remember. We sold our apartment in Brooklyn and bought a house in Westchester. We added a new member to our family, Oliver, in June and moved the whole family up north 3 weeks later to the first house I’ve ever lived in. In November, I left Foursquare after 4 years and spent the last month and a half of the year hanging with the kids and having a wide variety of conversations with people exploring different possibilities for