Hey friends, how's your week been?
I got a cool new jacket:
Other than being a very warm and comfy fall outfit, I bought this to wear to upcoming events to serve as a conversation starter and walking billboard.
I'll be at Storyblok's JoyConf event in Brooklyn next Tuesday (11/4), and at Camp Clarity in Palm Springs the week of December 1. If you see me wearing this jacket, ask me for some stickers or a pencil!
Speaking of warmth, now that the weather in NJ has finally gotten chilly, Johnny Cash has taken up his favorite position in the house right in front of the kitchen heating.
Someone just asked me this morning why I chose to start an agency like Bits&Letters, as opposed to staying in corporate or starting a product company — what about it feels different?
It’s because I need to stay close to real problems and the people who have them.
This quality made me effective in some of my product roles early on. But the further you get from users, the more your work becomes about stakeholder management and metrics theater rather than actually solving problems. Over time, it got harder and harder to have the kind of real-world impact I want to have, while also demonstrating the “impact” necessary to thrive as a corporate PM.
The quality that makes products or productized solutions great for business (repeatability, scale) can also leave behind lots of people whose problems don’t precisely fit a template, or whose needs have outgrown a turnkey solution.
Agency work gives me direct access to our clients’ problems, and a lot more leverage to build great solutions and feel the impact they have on folks and their businesses.
When a Series A company needs to expand their content model or refresh their design, I’m not six layers removed from that conversation, nor am I trying to figure out how this company’s problems represent a scalable, resellable pattern. We get to be present with this client and problem, and solve it more effectively than any product could. We can see what’s working, what’s not, and apply everything I learned building design systems at enterprise scale to companies who are at exactly the right stage to benefit from that thinking.
For me, that’s worth more than another dashboard showing engagement metrics going up and to the right while users quietly struggle with the actual product.
If any of that sounds like someone you or someone you know might wanna work with, B&L has availability for new projects starting in Q1 or Q2 2026, and I’d love to chat about how we can help solve some interesting problems.
Talk soon,
- DD