The pre-amble
“Jamie’s disclaimer” was something I’d often say at work, either seriously or very much in jest. My team quickly learnt that I either had 90% confidence that what I was saying was correct, or 100% confidence that it was wrong. The fun was not always knowing straight away which it was.
Here’s a genuine one for those who've followed along over the last month, though. I promised myself I’d be more active here and post once a week, not because I thought my job was at risk (ironically), but because I was really excited about the things I was working on and how AI was changing the way I spent my time. While I did end up being put at risk of redundancy as part of an AI-focused restructure, I wrote this before that happened, so please bear that in mind...
An oblivious point of failure
I was the single point of failure on my own team, and I hadn't noticed.
Every time we needed to scope a new page request, someone would ask me. Not because there wasn't a process – there was. But the logic behind how I broke it down, what subtasks were needed, and what the dependencies were – that lived in my head. Not in a document. Not in a tool. In my head.
If I was on annual leave, things slowed down. If I was at capacity, things queued. The team was capable, but the knowledge wasn't accessible.
So I built an app
Nothing particularly complex. I used Lovable, a vibe-coding tool, to build a page request scoping app that captures the decision logic I'd been carrying around for years. You enter the page type, the parameters and the context, and it outputs a structured breakdown of the subtasks required – and why.
The first thing someone said when I showed it to the team was, "Oh, so that's how you think about it."
Exactly
Knowledge in someone's head is a liability. Knowledge in a system is an asset. The PM's job isn't just to make good decisions. It's to make those decisions scalable, observable and independent of you being in the room.
If there's something your team regularly comes to you for that lives only in your head, that's worth fixing. It doesn't require a team of engineers. It might just require an afternoon and the right AI tool.
What would you build to get the knowledge out of your head?