Brian Conn

I've been building software since 2013 and running production SaaS platforms for most of that time. I started this practice in 2021.

It has always been the same work under a different name. Four years ago it was SaaS cultural transformation: helping engineering organizations stop shipping software the way an enterprise ships software and start operating a product. Now it's AI cultural transformation. The technology changed. The actual problem, which is people and how an organization decides things, did not.

What I bring is one foot in each world. I work in AI-forward development, agents and the tooling around them and the review and measurement problems that come with them, and I write about it most weeks. I also spent more than a decade inside organizations that look nothing like that, running on-call rotations, SLO commitments, and delivery processes that had to hold up under real load. Most of the organizations I talk to are somewhere between the two and stuck.

I'm not going to claim I know something about AI that nobody else does. Everyone is figuring this out at the same time. What I have is context and a decent sense of what good looks like inside an engineering organization, because I've run them, and I'd rather meet a team where it actually is than where a conference talk says it should be.

Outside of software I'm an avid photographer, and at home it's my wife, our son, and two cats. All photos on this site (except the portrait here) were taken by me.

My resume