Fieldway.org

03/25/2026

Looking forward to today!

03/19/2026

I've spent the last couple of weeks vibe designing and vibe coding three new websites — replacements for my business site, personal portfolio, and a new branded service I'm building with my brother-in-law.

My sites have been on FG Funnels, and I've been happy there. But after upgrading to Claude Max a few months ago, I wanted to build them myself. What I discovered: I can do more, and do it faster, than ever before.

Two things unlocked this:

1. Schema markup for AI visibility. FG Funnels doesn't support it. Custom-built sites do — and that means AI tools can actually ingest and leverage my content to drive traffic.

2. Voice-to-site workflows. Instead of wrestling with block-based editors, I use Wispr to dictate and Claude to create and update pages in real time.

Here's a concrete example: I expanded all 21 case studies on my portfolio. After the AI got some details wrong, I dictated 8,500 words of corrections — and it's currently updating all 21 simultaneously.

Done by hand on FG Funnels? Weeks of work. Done this way? A few hours.

And the new sites are scoring 100 across the board in Lighthouse — before I've even set up CloudFront caching.

I'm going on a short vacation, but when I'm back, here's what I'm planning to share:

📌 Week 1 — A day per site: what I built, how I built it, and why I made the decisions I did.

📌 Week 2 — The tools I'm using and how I've been building and iterating them for product management and web development work.

Excited to pull back the curtain on all of it.

03/18/2026

A mother of nine from Verona with no technical background walked into a hackathon, built a working AI-powered app over one weekend, and won.

Her story is the clearest example I've seen of how AI actually works best in practice – and it's not what most people expect.

I wrote about it this week in the Springfield Business Journal.

Guest columnist Matthew Stublefield writes that you don't need to be a tech pioneer to benefit from AI.

03/06/2026

They're going to eat all our clover 😊

03/05/2026

Excited to share that I'm speaking at the Springfield Tech Council's STC Squared Conference on March 25th!

My session is called "How Teams Can Triple Their Productivity Without Working Harder" – and it's built around a real story.

One of the teams I worked with was five months behind schedule, dealing with an 80% defect rate, and burning people out with 60+ hour weeks. Three months after we started working together, they'd tripled their productivity, cut delivery time from 4–6 weeks down to 5–7 days, and the team was actually going home at 5 PM.

What changed wasn't the people or the tools. What changed was how they looked at the problem. They started diagnosing root causes instead of treating symptoms.

I'll be walking through the diagnostic framework that made that possible – including the 5 dimensions I look at and a practical checklist attendees can use on their own teams right away.

If you're in the Springfield area and work with teams (in any industry – I've done this in tech, healthcare, media, and education), I'd really love to see you there. Register at https://sgftechcouncil.com/squared-2026

📅 Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 1:45 PM
📍 STC Squared Conference | Springfield Tech Council

03/03/2026

I got to sit down with Chris Crosby and Mel on The Unbroken Podcast and tell the whole story – from running my high school's network as a student, to a 25-hour Christmas Eve server upgrade that almost broke me, to getting laid off six weeks before my third son was born, to starting Fieldway.

We talked about the stuff I don't usually put in the LinkedIn posts. Losing two dozen people by the time I was in college. My dad's cancer. The isolation of working for yourself when you don't have coworkers to share life with anymore. Putting 700 hours into a course nobody bought. And the prayer that changed the direction of my business – even though it made zero financial sense at the time.

Chris and Mel have this way of making you feel comfortable enough to be real. An hour went by and it felt like 15 minutes.

If you've got a commute, a workout, or some dishes to do – give it a listen. I'd love to hear what part hits home for you.

Links in the first comment so you can pick your preferred platform.

02/19/2026

A speaker asked a man to sing Amazing Grace in front of a crowd.

He did. Professional. Technically solid. Good.

Then the speaker gave him a reason to sing it. A personal why.

He sang it again — and the room changed. Emotional. Heartfelt. Real.

Same skill. Same song. Two completely different performances.

My friend Brandy runs the Boys and Girls Club of Springfield and she shares this video constantly with her staff. Because when people know why they're serving these kids — not just what they do, but why — it changes what they do and how they do it.
That's just as true in product work.

If your why is "I need a paycheck" or "my boss wants these metrics" — that's not going to inspire your best solutions. If you don't actually care about the people you're building for, the work reflects it. And your life won't feel that fulfilling either.

Maybe your why sucks right now. That's okay to admit.

But take some time to ask: what kind of work would actually motivate you to serve people? What gives you a why that makes the work worth doing?

If you're in a role that doesn't align with your values, that's worth reflecting on.

What's your current why? Tell me in the comments.

02/18/2026

Your team is busy shipping. Features are going out the door. The board sees velocity.

And users aren't engaging with any of it.

I've seen this pattern across companies for 20+ years — and it almost always traces back to the same thing: nobody defined the why behind the work. Not a mission statement pinned to a Confluence page. The actual, internalized "why" that teams make decisions against every single day.

When that's missing, teams default to building features instead of solving problems. They miss the users. They miss the real outcomes. Quarterly objectives take forever to write because nobody actually knows what they're trying to accomplish.

The work looks productive. It's just not connecting to anyone.

And this is a top-down problem. If leadership hasn't built a genuine vision and mission, teams have nothing to navigate by. The good news? You don't need a week-long strategy retreat. I've seen this done well in a couple of hours — and it changes how every decision on the team gets made after that.

Next time you're planning a quarter, step back first. Go back to the why.

What's your team's actual why right now — and does everyone on the team know it?

02/17/2026

I have so much work that I don't even know all the work that I have to do.

The mountain is so big I cannot see all of it at once.

In the past, this would have frozen me. Days or even weeks would pass with me overwhelmed, procrastinating, moving nothing forward. Or I'd fall into the project planning trap—spending days building giant lists and checklists instead of making actual progress.

What I do now: I set a 10-minute timer in the morning, write down everything I can think of that I need to do, and figure out the prioritization. What's the next right thing?

Then I get to work.

That 10-minute list is usually three or four days of work, maybe a week. It's not everything I need to do, but it's the stuff that was top of mind, weighing on me, important.

And as long as I'm doing stuff and moving it forward, I'm making progress.

So if you're feeling overwhelmed by work you can't even fully see yet—take 10 minutes at the start of your day, write it all down, then get to work.

What's your pattern when the workload gets overwhelming? Freeze up or fall into planning mode?

02/12/2026

I caught myself today typing the same long prompt into Claude Code for the third time.

Wanted it to search my Obsidian vault, find my research notes, interpret them, and use that data in what it's building. Every. Single. Time.

Then I stopped and thought: "This is dumb."

So I built a Claude Skill that does all of that automatically. Now it knows how to search my research, pull the right context, and use it – without me typing anything.

This reminded me of Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" from the 1970s. He described teams having a "Tool Smith" – someone whose job was building custom tools so everyone else could work better. Back then, they were creating new programming languages and syntax.

Turns out I'm the Tool Smith now. Claude Code is how I'm building.

The funny part? I have a skill for making skills. So every tool I build makes it easier to build the next one.

I'm not sharing this to flex. I'm sharing it because if you're a product professional still doing repetitive manual work – sprint planning updates, stakeholder report formatting, data analysis prep – you can build your own tools now too.

You don't need to be technical. You just need to notice what you're doing three times.

What's the one thing you do every week that makes you think "there has to be a better way"?

Also, want to get started learning this stuff? Check out https://fieldway.org/resources/build-your-ai-consultant

02/11/2026

Everyone's talking about using AI to build the next billion-dollar company.

I upgraded to Claude Max yesterday for a much simpler reason: I want to cut two hours off my workday.

Not to ship a product. To build a private tool that solves a problem only I have. That's it.

I started my career in IT building bash scripts and shell scripts – any way I could automate my work so I could either rest more or think more creatively. Vibe coding is that same instinct multiplied by a hundred.

And here's the thing that actually matters for your career. When your company looks around wondering who's producing, you want to be the person with the secret sauce. Not the person paying for AI access just to make pictures – the person who built a personal toolset that makes them faster, sharper, and harder to replace.

It's not about the subscription. It's about getting your time back and making yourself more valuable.

If you want to get started, I've got a free beginner course called Build Your AI Consultant on fieldway.org. It walks you through using AI to build a tool that saves you real time.

https://fieldway.org/resources/build-your-ai-consultant

02/10/2026

SaaS stocks slipped after Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 last week. The investor narrative? People will just build their own tools now instead of paying $15/month for software.

I don't think that's what's actually happening.

Not everybody wants to build stuff, right? They want to pay their 15 bucks and move on with their lives. Same reason there's stuff around my house I'm not going to do – sure, I could figure it out, but that's not a skill I want to develop or how I want to spend my time.

I'm hearing a lot of doom and gloom from software developers who think their jobs are just going to disappear. There will be more competition, absolutely. But people who can actually build solutions aren't going anywhere.

Here's what actually matters now: You can't just stay in your lane doing one thing. The skill to develop is defining problems and building solutions end-to-end. Not just taking requirements – understanding the full problem, thinking it through completely, and creating what's needed.

The engineers who thrive aren't the ones who just code what they are told. They're the ones who can see the whole system, spot where things are broken, and build the fix. That's being a builder.

Can you do that? Then you're fine.

What's your take – are you seeing this shift in your team?