Thinking, in public
Field notes on design, engineering and growth — written by the people who ship the work. No thought leadership, just lessons with receipts.
Conversion copywriting: clarity beats clever
Copy is the cheapest conversion lever you own. How to build a message hierarchy from customer research, map objections, and test copy without twelve variants.
Your search box is a research department
Nobody lies to a search box. Mining internal site search — zero-results reviews, synonym dictionaries, query taxonomy — into a content roadmap that compounds.
Gift cards are products. Treat them like it.
Gift cards sit in a footer link and a plugin default. They deserve product thinking: delivery scheduling, balance checks without login walls, honest expiry, calm recovery.
Address forms for the world: one field doesn't fit all
International checkout forms: per-country field order, autocomplete's confident lies, the phone field's real job, PO-box honesty, and testing with real parcels.
Campaign naming conventions: boring is the feature
UTM and campaign names are infrastructure, not admin. A grammar that survives staff turnover, separators, tooling that enforces it, and cleaning old messes.
Cart cross-sells that don't read as desperation
Cross-sells pay when they answer one complementary question and shut up. Placement ranked by distraction cost, price-band logic, and measuring incrementality.
Gift flows: the seasonal feature that deserves year-round craft
Gifting is a revenue line with a calendar. Multi-address checkout, date-promise logic, gift-card UX, the recipient experience, and a peak-season runbook.
The first 30 days: onboarding a client engagement
How the first 30 days of an agency engagement should run: kickoffs that surface real decision-makers, baseline metrics, access week, and artefacts that prevent surprises.
Naming features and tiers: clarity beats poetry at checkout
Feature names and pricing tiers live in the hardest-working UI you own. Rules for naming what your product does so users buy faster and support sighs less.
Evals before features: how we measure LLM quality
How we build evaluation harnesses for LLM features: golden datasets, rubric graders, human review lanes and regression tracking that stakeholders can read.
Site speed is a merchandising decision
Milliseconds are margin. How to attribute revenue to performance honestly, where to spend speed budget on commerce templates, and how to make the case.
Dates and times: pickers, zones and the lies of relative time
Calendar grids vs typing, timezone display rules for teams, relative timestamps that decay to absolute, and the DST edge cases that bite months later.