Dear hiring team,
Last year I built and launched a short-story production app. A handful of writers used it to get their ideas made. That was the moment I stopped second-guessing the pivot — an idea I'd whiteboarded alone was now a tool other people were shipping work through.
That project is the clearest example of how I work. I'd been experimenting in Japan after leaving banking, turning a vague hunch about creative tooling into something I could put in front of real users. The useful lesson wasn't that the first version worked — it was the discipline that came after. When a user didn't engage the way I expected, I learned to treat that as a signal about either the tool or my selection of testers, not a verdict on the work. I stopped looking inside my head for confirmation and started looking at what people actually did with what I built. That shift — from instinct to instrument — is the part I'd bring to instructional design. A lesson, like a tool, either moves a learner through the thing or it doesn't, and the evidence is in the behavior, not the author's feelings about the draft.
The pattern underneath: I'm strongest when something is still forming. Research, whiteboarding, talking to people for inspiration, then building the first rough version fast enough to test it. I've spent the last year doing this with AI tools, a screenplay, and essays on Substack — different surfaces, same loop. Novel problem, quick prototype, external feedback, revise.
In the first thirty days, I'd pick one existing module that underperforms against its learning objective, rebuild it as a prototype using the AI tooling I've been working with, put it in front of real learners, and bring back what the behavior — not the survey — says about whether it worked.