Learning to Share Work Without Selling It

On finding a way to talk about what I do without it feeling like a pitch.

A year ago, I wrote a short post asking a question I didn't have an answer to. How do you share the work you're proud of without it feeling like you're selling something?

I've been sitting with that question ever since. This is my attempt at an answer, and it comes with a bit of news.

For most of my career, I never had to think about it. I spent years in public education, first as a 7th grade science teacher, then in district leadership. When I talked about the work back then, promoting a great teacher, a program that was changing kids' lives, a team doing something remarkable, it never felt like selling. It couldn't, because it was never really about me or about the district. It was about the students. The work spoke for itself and I was just pointing at it.

Then I moved to the private sector, and something shifted. The same impulse, sharing work I believed in, suddenly carried a different weight. Now there was a product involved. A company. The nagging worry that anything I said would sound like a pitch. So I did what a lot of us do when we aren't sure how to sound. I went quiet. I became a lurker, reading everyone else's posts and rarely writing my own.

What I've figured out over the past year is almost embarrassingly simple, but it took me a while to trust it. The way to share the work without selling it is to stop talking about the outcome and start talking about the craft.

Not "look at this amazing thing we built." That's the pitch. Instead, here's what I'm actually working on, here are the decisions I'm wrestling with, and here, honestly, are the parts that aren't working yet. Nobody reads that as a sales pitch, because a sales pitch never admits the thing is unfinished. The honesty is the whole difference. When you talk about the real texture of the work, the messy middle, the calls you're unsure about, the things that broke, you aren't selling anything. You're just letting people see how the sausage gets made. And it turns out that's far more interesting than the finished sausage.

The news is that I'm now doing that work in a new seat. I'm moving into product management full time at Gaggle, where I'll be leading our Guardian Portal and the device agents and extensions that districts rely on to keep students safe. I loved my time as a solutions engineer, but I couldn't pass up the chance to get closer to building the tools that help districts help kids.

And a big part of what I want to write about is how that building actually happens now, because it has changed. So much of my day runs through AI and agentic tooling. Drafting specs, shaping ideas, wrestling planning docs into something useful, and increasingly, working alongside agents that take on real parts of the work. Some of it works better than I ever expected. Some of it fails in ways that are worth talking about openly. That's the stuff I want to share here. Not the polished demo, but the real experience of doing knowledge work when a capable, occasionally wrong, always literal partner is in the loop with you.

There's one thing that hasn't changed across every seat I've sat in. Teacher, district leader, solutions engineer, and now product manager. I'm also a parent of kids in public schools and married to a teacher, so the work is never abstract for me. Whatever I build, I keep coming back to one question. Does this actually help the people protecting kids do their job better?

That's what this blog is going to be. The honest version of the work. What I'm building, the calls I'm making, the things that don't work yet, and every so often, the reason any of it matters in the first place.

I'm still a recovering lurker, so bear with me. But I'm done being quiet about work I'm proud of. It turns out you can share it after all. You just have to tell the truth about it.