Outcomes before capabilities
Useful AI starts with a consequential problem, an accountable owner, and a way to measure what changes.
AI product leader, builder, and writer
Dan Patrick Smith.
I turn emerging AI capabilities into useful products, operating models, and business outcomes.
Read the field notes
01 / Current thinking
Three ideas I keep returning to.
A paved road for builders
The future is governed citizen development: more people solving problems within clear technical and human boundaries.
Leadership is leverage
The work changes when your judgment has to travel through people, portfolios, operating models, and culture.
02 / Writing
Notes from the middle of the change.
Essays about building useful AI, leading through uncertainty, and turning new capabilities into real systems.
01 2026 02 2026 03 2025 04 2024 05 2024
Agent skills
Unlocking Reusable Intelligence: What SKILL.md Files Are and How to Build Effective Agent Skills
Agentic engineering
On 'Vibe Coding'
Human-computer interaction
User Interface Evolution: From Punchcards to Conversations and Beyond
AI product quality
Regression Testing Probabilistic AI Systems: Precision, Recall, and F1
A personal detour
My Embarrassing Bitcoin Story
03 / Reading
What is shaping my thinking.
Two books currently on the shelf, with room for work and life to inform each other.
Enterprise AI / Operating model
Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI
A timely perspective on evolving enterprise applications with AI, from useful capability to transformational business outcomes. I am especially interested in how it builds on Kersten's earlier Project to Product, which helped reshape how the industry thinks about flow and value.
View the bookFiction
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Also on the current shelf.
04 / Selected work
Things I have made real.
AI SkillsBank
A visual home for saving, versioning, organizing, and moving agent skills between AI tools. Built from a personal need during the first wave of persistent, tool-using agents.
Product leadership
From possibility to business outcome
Framing the right problem, aligning technical and business teams, and creating conditions for good decisions.
Agent fieldwork
Learning by building
Working directly with memory, tools, skills, portability, and the practical limits of autonomy.
05 / About
I am interested in the point where technological possibility meets human reality.
I lead AI product work inside a large, regulated enterprise and build independent experiments to understand where the technology is heading next.
Outside the work, I am a husband and father of three. I make room for writing, hiking, biking, golf, Formula 1, and the occasional idea that refuses to leave me alone.