I’m a product manager on paternity leave, and the first two weeks have been consumed entirely by my daughter Zoey. We spend our days working through the ongoing negotiation that is tummy time, sharing smiles, and chatting. She gets that from her mother.
So what is this place?
Paternity leave means I have a rare and probably unrepeatable window where no one is expecting anything from me professionally. That’s a strange feeling after years of roadmaps, sprints, and stakeholder reviews. The instinct to build something didn’t go away. It just had nowhere to go.
So I made somewhere for it to go. This site started as a sandbox where I could tinker without stakes, and it’s slowly turned into something I actually want to keep. The projects section is where I’m documenting what I build. This blog is where I document what I’m thinking.
The AI angle
Over the last year I had been using AI pretty effectively for individual PM tasks: user story generation, requirement gathering and synthesis, collecting and organizing thoughts. Useful, but incremental. The real shift came when agents entered my workflow alongside the ability to build a central engine that could pull wide context for individual tasks. Suddenly things that used to take a lot of manual assembly just… happened.
That became even more apparent when I started using Claude Code. Being able to pull insights across a variety of repos and understand how our team’s evolution fit into the broader picture we were drawing was genuinely new. It changed how I thought about my job, not just how I did it.
I wanted to spend some of my leave exploring that further. Not in a professional capacity (no deliverables, no OKRs), just genuinely poking at things to see what they can do. What’s actually impressive and what’s hype? What does this mean for how I think about product work when I go back?
There’s also a portfolio angle here. I wanted a place to collect PM-adjacent work I can actually point to. But honestly, this is as much for me as anything else. I have 14 weeks. That’s a real window to think, build, and write without the usual noise, and I want to use it well.
(A quick note of genuine gratitude to Deloitte for the generous paternity leave that makes any of this possible.)
The plan is to keep notes here as I go. Some posts will be about specific tools or projects. Some will be more half-formed. All of it written between naps, during bottles, and in whatever quiet moments Zoey’s schedule allows.
If you’re a PM, a builder, or just someone trying to make sense of where all this is heading, I hope some of it is useful. And if you’re just here because you found a link somewhere: hi, I’m Zach. Welcome to the playground.