The Builder’s
Leader

Engineering leadership for retail and eCommerce teams navigating AI.

The patterns your team feels but hasn’t named yet. Weekly. Free.

Brands I've Built For

Nike
Converse
Life is Good
Bauer
Easton
Skechers

What People Say

Jono is the manager every engineer hopes to work for at least once in their career.

Masom Hamadeh

Software Engineer @ Converse, Nike Inc.

Jono may be the most talented technologist I've worked with in my long career.

Sam Dushkin

Engagement Director @ Chartis.io

Jono has been my greatest professional accelerant. He provided the framework I needed to grow into a technology leader.

Chris Schwab

Engineering Leader @ Life is Good

A natural born leader ... working with Jono was a masterclass in drive with insane depth of knowledge.

Alex Via

Global Digital Product Leader @ Converse, Nike Inc.

Jono excels at building teams and solutions from zero to one.

Alex Munoz

Head of Global Retail and Digital Engineering Support @ Converse, Nike Inc.

Jono propels any team he is a part of.

Dan Seiders

Senior Resident Solutions Engineer @ HashiCorp

Latest Writing

Black-and-white illustration of a bearded man in a baseball cap, hand on the brim, looking down, with stacked weight plates behind his head like a halo, suggesting the weight of judgment.

You Can't Align AI Judgment If You've Lost Your Own

The governance gap nobody talks about when your team ships AI-generated code

Technical leaders are being asked to set AI standards, define acceptable output quality, and govern what gets into production. You cannot do any of that if you've lost your own connection to how your team builds. Here's what the drift looks like, and what it costs you when AI has already doubled your team's output.

Black-and-white illustration of a bearded man in a baseball cap holding a panel with a rising bar chart and growth arrow; beneath the surface, a cross-section shows a dark cavity with writhing worm-like shapes, suggesting hidden decay behind polished metrics.

Adoption Metrics Are Not Skill Metrics

AI usage numbers can look healthy while your engineers quietly stop being able to explain their own systems

When I reviewed my team's AI adoption dashboard last quarter, every number was moving in the right direction. What the dashboard couldn't show me was who had stopped understanding the systems they were shipping. Adoption metrics and skill development metrics are not the same thing. I had been treating them like they were.