These patterns emerged from building Fabric zero to $7.5M raised to acquisition, driving agentic product
development within MSCI, and transforming MSCI from waterfall and revenue-driven to OKR and agile.
Not theory—what actually worked when nothing else existed.
psychology
Live in the Problem Before Building the Solution
After 300+ customer demos at Fabric, I learned more than any market research could teach. Early on,
I thought I understood the problem from my finance background. I was wrong about 70% of it. The advisors'
real pain wasn't lack of analytics—it was losing hours to manual data entry, client reporting, and not
knowing how to apply their own frameworks to each client in a personalized way.
The pattern: Understand the root of the problem through small iterations. Talk to users
before writing requirements. Watch them work. Find where they're using spreadsheets and duct tape—that's
where the real opportunity hides.
speed
Ship Something Embarrassing, Then Iterate
Fabric's first demo was embarrassing. Broken edge cases, no error handling, UI that looked like a
programmer designed it (guilty). But it solved the core workflow. We got our first paying customer with
that embarrassing prototype. They didn't care about polish—they cared that it saved them 5 hours a week.
The pattern: Ship earlier than you think. Find the people who want to be a part of the
process to build. Ship it to real users in real workflows. Watch what breaks. Fix the painful parts. Repeat.
Perfect is the enemy of learning.
diversity_3
Build the Team That Can't Not Ship Together
At Fabric, wearing every hat taught me that product isn't a solo discipline. The best outcomes came when
engineering, design, and I sat together—not in meetings, but actually building. At MSCI, managing 23 people
across 20+ countries, the same truth held: great products emerge from teams that communicate obsessively and
trust deeply.
The pattern: Hire for collaborative energy over individual brilliance. Create tight
feedback loops—daily standups, shared dashboards, open Slack channels. Remove blockers ruthlessly. Product
leadership is 20% vision, 80% removing friction so teams can ship.
query_stats
Let Data Inform Your Intuition
Our personalized portfolio creation feature had 4% usage. Meanwhile, the personalized portfolio suggestion
approach got 90% adoption. The data didn't overrule intuition—it helped us understand what we were missing
and why our initial approach wasn't resonating.
The pattern: Instrument everything from day one. Set up dashboards before launch. Review
usage data regularly. When data conflicts with intuition, use that to know there's something you don't
understand and find out why. Data augments intuition, providing a critical check on assumptions.
visibility
Show Don't Tell
After joining MSCI, a large organization managing things in old-school waterfall style, leadership would ask
how our team accomplished what we did. We'd clearly articulate our approach—OKRs, bottom-up empowerment, agile
iterations. They'd say they understood, even articulate it back to us in ways that seemed like genuine
understanding. Then they'd take actions that completely contradicted those principles.
This was a new lesson for me. In 0-to-1 startups, shared consciousness comes naturally—everyone builds
together from scratch, creating a common lived experience. But in a larger, established organization, there's
a separate consciousness born from different lived experiences. These two consciousnesses can only merge through
new shared experiences, not through explanations of past ones. Understanding words isn't the same as understanding
reality.
The only way to reach true alignment is to show, not tell. We're currently in the middle of transitioning teams
bottom-up through demonstration—letting results speak louder than any explanation ever could. One team seeing
another ship faster with OKRs is worth a thousand presentations about why OKRs work.
The pattern: Don't try to convince leadership top-down with words. Show results bottom-up
with working teams. Let success be contagious. When people see tangible outcomes—faster shipping, happier
teams, better products—they stop asking "how does this work?" and start asking "how do we do this too?"
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