Claude 101
A plain-English handbook for anyone: how the model actually works, what makes a prompt good, and how Projects, Skills, and Connectors fit together. No technical background required.
Read Claude 101I came to product from twelve years on the front line, leading a service team and cultivating member relationships. In every role I've held, I've been the person who learns the technical systems and translates between the people building them, the people supporting them, and the customers using them. That's the bridge I bring to product.
Twenty years in hospitality shaped how I think about product. Martha's Vineyard, Vail, then twelve years at Exclusive Resorts: long enough to build a real instinct for what customers need, what they'll forgive, and what they'll never forget. I bring that to every prioritization decision I make.
At every job I've ever had, I've been the person who digs into how the systems actually work — and then becomes the one training everyone else on them. That instinct is what changed my trajectory.
In April 2022 I became the key Member Services stakeholder for our new Member Portal. The job description was "bring the member perspective." I went well past that. I trained the whole MS team on the new product. I created the feedback Slack channel still used today. Before I ever joined Engineering, I was already in Jira writing stories and troubleshooting inside our Auth0 authentication platform.
Exclusive Resorts created a Product role on the Engineering team specifically for me, because I'd already forged that path through the work and through the relationships I built with PMs, UX, developers, and the Head of Engineering. Twelve months later, I went from Junior PM to Product Manager and full owner of the Member Portal, a product I had worked on for four years. I now own the roadmap, the decisions, and the day-to-day.
What I bring to product is unusual: I deeply understand our customers because I spent twelve years on the phone with them, and I deeply understand our complex technical systems because I refused to treat them as a black box. That combination is what I optimize for.
A members-only luxury travel club. I own the Member Portal — the $200M+ digital surface our customers use to plan and book the trips they fly across the world to take.
See the case studies →Discovery, prioritization, sprint planning, release. Booking, trip planning, customer engagement workflows — the whole portal. I held the mobile app too, for the first year of the role.
When an architect comes with a recommendation, I dig until I'm sure we're solving the right problem — not just the first problem someone named. I'd rather slow a meeting by ten minutes than ship a fix that solves the wrong thing.
DevTools, GraphQL traces, API analysis, Auth0 spelunking, AI-assisted repo triage with Claude Code. I triage independently before I escalate — engineering's time is for the part that's actually theirs.
Twelve years on the phone with members means I know exactly which moments are sacred. Pre-arrival friction. Post-trip follow-through. Booking flow under a lottery release. I prioritize there.
When I took ownership, features were stalling across multiple sprints. We now ship bi-weekly major releases with continuous hotfixes, with a real release-notes practice tuned for both internal and exec audiences.
Not as an autocomplete. As a teammate that's read every reference doc, knows our architecture and team directory by name, drafts tickets in our voice, summarizes my Zoom transcripts to Confluence every afternoon at 5:36, and analyzes the weekly member survey before I'm done with my first coffee on Monday.
My project folder, the six-section CLAUDE.md that defines how I work, and the context files that capture my team's voice.
Read the setupTickets, release notes, exec recaps, research synthesis, survey analysis, repo questions — all from the same project with the same context.
See the workflowFive free guides. Two for anyone starting from zero, three for PMs who want the full setup: Claude Code, portable context, and Cowork built on ~80 sessions.
Browse the resourcesWhen I work out how to do something well with tools that change month to month, I write it up. Five guides now: two that assume no technical background at all, three for PMs who want the full setup. Each one is a thing I wish someone had handed me.
A plain-English handbook for anyone: how the model actually works, what makes a prompt good, and how Projects, Skills, and Connectors fit together. No technical background required.
Read Claude 101The answer to “okay, but what do I do with it?” Automate a recurring chore, pull one report from many tools, and produce a standardized deliverable every time.
Read the PlaybookA complete setup-and-workflow guide for non-engineering PMs. Folder structure, CLAUDE.md, context files, MCP connectors, daily workflows, and a five-week onboarding path.
Read the guideI taught myself product the way I taught myself oil painting — by committing to it on weekends. These are the certifications I picked up between the promotion and now.
Four roles at Exclusive Resorts, each one a closer step to product. I joined as a Membership Account Manager in 2012, was promoted into regional leadership, then into Member Portal stakeholder, then into Engineering as a Product Manager. Promoted again twelve months later.
I forged my way into product, and I'm thriving here.
The transition wasn't a side door. It was years of being the person who learned the system before anyone asked me to — and then the relationships, the credentials, and the work to back it up. Twelve months from junior to PM, six certifications in eighteen months, and a platform I own end-to-end now.
If you're hiring, collaborating, or just want to talk product — I'd rather have the conversation than the email thread.