Notes from the practice.

The arithmetic of insourcing

When a service operation insources a function previously held by a contract partner, the math is rarely linear. A note on what queueing theory reveals about the true cost of replacement headcount, and why the answer is rarely "more agents."

The instinct in service operations is to replace volume one-for-one. Queueing math does not scale that way, particularly when the inbound mix is bimodal. A scenario approach that compares fully insourced, hybrid, and queue-managed options produces meaningfully different cost and service profiles, and the cost-optimal solution is almost never the headcount-naïve one.

Aggregate numbers explain very little.

Transaction-level data, properly cut, explains almost everything. A short methodology note on what shifts in a diagnostic engagement when the analyst works one layer below the rollup.

Summary metrics compress information by design. The cost is that the findings that change a decision almost always live in the unsummarized data. A pricing question dressed up as a revenue problem is one example. A capacity question hidden inside an employee turnover number is another.

Where custom AI tooling actually saves time

Not in the places most advisory firms claim. A field note on the categories of work where a small, purpose-built AI tool genuinely shifts a team's operating cadence.

The high-leverage applications tend to be unglamorous: agentic research and outreach workflows, retrieval against internal documents, decision-support tools that read live operational data, and lightweight applications that replace recurring manual reporting. The places AI tooling underperforms are also predictable, and worth naming explicitly inside an engagement before any code is written.

Why "ATS optimization" is the wrong frame

The applicant tracking system is not the gatekeeper. It is the librarian. Once that distinction is understood, the entire job-search workflow inverts.

A gatekeeper decides who gets in. A librarian decides how things are filed. The ATS is the latter. The actual gatekeeper is the recruiter, and the recruiter's screening behavior is a different problem than it was three years ago, shaped almost entirely by a multi-fold increase in application volume driven by AI submissions. The correct response is not to optimize harder for the librarian. The correct response is to write a document the gatekeeper can tell was made by hand.

The "Operator" shift in senior tech hiring

Strategy and Operations, BizOps, Chief of Staff. The function has been re-titled, but the shift is more than cosmetic. A short read on what the language change signals, and what it means for candidates positioned around the previous label.

The first-person summary problem

Every resume opens with a "professional summary." Almost every one of them is wrong. A short field guide to the voice that actually lands at the staff and principal level.