Michael A. O’Neill
Thoughts from two decades building data products, platform products, and AI systems. Mostly about trust, context, and the ways product managers get things wrong before they get them right.
Latest on Product
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Totally Meaningless, Totally Impressive
24,396 pages of data product documentation, generated deterministically, no human author.” It’s a great line for making a room go quiet. For a second. I built a fleet of agentic tools to document Disney’s data catalog. It works. I also don’t think anyone should build what I built.
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It’s Compounding. But I’m Stuck at Three Users.
Claude asked me this afternoon if I “want to keep rolling.” I replied, “Keep going. No work for me here. All the context I’ve spent time building is really paying off.” One of my product areas is Super Bowl LXI. I’m responsible for providing Disney+ and ESPN App viewership data that would otherwise be invisible…
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I deliberately created a release management problem
For our soft launch last week, my engineering lead (Donnie) and I deliberately chose a sub-optimal way to share context. Well, what we think is sub-optimal. We used the feature that would get us to “market” fastest, not the one we think is the best long-term solution. We’re building the plane while it’s taking off–we…
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Soft launch
I soft launched my context product this week. A fellow with Artic Consulting, Amit Giri, has been asking me interesting questions on LinkedIn about my exploration of context engineering. Good questions. Interesting questions. Difficult questions. Very difficult questions. A few days ago, he shared a report from Redis about context engineering. Quick version: First, everyone…
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How Do I Get a Second User?
I’m working on an organizational memory product. It’s a fancy way of saying documentation for agents, at scale, across the company, distributed so users don’t have to struggle to find the context. I’ve built lots of rich context, and I could put you to sleep with anecdotes about how it’s helped the agents I’ve built…