For most of my career, I was close to building software. Close enough to understand it, close enough to partner with the people doing it, but never the one at the keyboard.
And honestly, I kept telling myself I just wasn’t ready yet.
My career has had some transitions. In marketing, I was close to product. In product, I was close to analytics. In analytics, I was close to data science. In data science, I was close to Generative AI. At every stage, I was adjacent to the thing I actually wanted to be doing, and I kept waiting until I felt ready enough to close the gap. Eventually I would get there but it took time.
I had an idea on a walk last week. Bring March Madness-style brackets to the World Cup. Friends and family pick teams, track scores, add a Golden Boot pick, build a leaderboard. The kind of thing that’s fun for people who don’t follow soccer and want to feel like they’re in on it.
Normally, that idea goes nowhere. It lives in my notes or in my head and dies there.
This time, I opened Claude and just said: “Ask me questions to make this idea fun and engaging.”
A day later I had a working website. A real one, deployed, live, shareable.
I didn’t understand everything that got built. Not even close. But instead of stopping when something broke, I stayed with it. I asked better questions. I worked through what didn’t make sense. I kept going.
That’s the shift I didn’t see coming.
The barrier to building isn’t knowledge anymore. It’s willingness. Willingness to stay in the problem when it gets uncomfortable, to move forward without having it all figured out, to treat the confusion as part of the process instead of a reason to stop.
I spent a long time on the bench, waiting until I was ready. I think a lot of people are still sitting there.
The gap between understanding and doing has never been smaller. The only question is whether you’re willing to find out.
Next up: the actual build story where I detail out my AI delivery pattern for those who want the technical details on how this came together. Part 2 of 2
