Peter McDonald

Most ideas die in the gap between "this could work" and "this actually shipped and found customers." Closing that gap — fast, and without the theatre — is the thing I can't stop thinking about.

I'm a product and operations leader who's spent close to a decade building and scaling a SaaS business end to end: taking a product function from a team of one (me, cheerfully out of my depth) to a real discipline, running company-wide operations through an acquisition, and lately leading practical AI into the core of how the business runs. Product, market, GTM, the commercial end — I've worked across most of it, which is why I think in operating models, not org charts.

What I write about here is the shift from AI-as-a-tool to AI-as-an-operating-model — and how founders and operators use it to move from idea to product to traction with far less drag. I build as well as advise (a couple of things in flight), so treat this as field notes, not theory.

Always up for a sharp problem, a strong flat white, and a system that hums. The writing is the long version, and working together is where it turns into a plan.