Hello⁰Also: "Salaams", "Howzit", "Say hi intrepid heroes".., it’s Irfaan

My spiel, roughly, is that I sit in the fever dream between "we should do X" and X actually happening¹This is the whole business model, honestly. Most strategy work is fine; most execution work is fine; the hard part is connecting the two.. A lot of people call this "generalist," which is a word that means nothing and describes me pretty well.

Two early careers, first banking²Where I learned to write emails that survives a compliance review, which turns out to be a real skill., then management consulting³McKinsey and Accenture. You come out able to build a framework for anything in about forty minutes and mistake this for expertise, which, sometimes, it is., have collapsed into one later one: operations⁴Started as product and data. Drifted into strategy, operations, and whatever gets labeled "special projects," which is corporate for "nobody owns this yet." at companies that are scaling⁵Scaling: the state in which the company has more ambition than infrastructure and is betting the gap closes before anyone notices.. My actual job is translating between the people setting direction and the people building the thing⁶Mostly through executive communication and facilitation, i.e. saying the same sentence to five different audiences until it's true (enough) for all of them., and making sure that gap stays small enough that problems get simplified⁷Sometimes success isn't simplifying the problem, it's convincing everyone to accept how complicated it actually is. rather than just renamed⁸"Program X", "X Task Force", "X Initiative", ....

Since 2019⁹Post-consulting. When I started doing real work. that's meant four new domains¹⁰Microfinance, remittances, e-commerce operations, life cycle assessment. No, they don't share anything in common - that's "generalist" thing from before., two executive-team seats¹¹Head of Product and Data, then Chief of Staff. Titles that mean "whatever is on fire, I'm now also on fire about it.", a coterie of functions reporting up to me at various points¹²Business analysts, product owners, product managers, data analysts, designers., more than ten products shipped¹³USSD, WhatsApp, mobile, API, SaaS. I am still trying to get a DOS interface product shipped., and a fairly thorough tour of the unglamorous machinery that keeps a company legal, staffed, and not on fire¹⁴ ISO compliance, HR restructures, standing up revops, writing the AI policy. The parts of running a company nobody puts on a slide.¹⁵Also, literally putting out fires as the safety officer..

Before any of this I wrote on the internet back when that wasn't a job title, on the version of the internet that was still mostly earnest¹⁶LiveJournal, Deviantart, Blogspot, and strangers at tweetups into friends.. Now I'm somewhere on the way to becoming anti-capitalist¹⁷Pairs well with being anti-fascist. Frankly a low bar, but you'd be surprised., in the sense of noticing the enshittification and occasionally doing something about it rather than just complaining about it.

Why are you reading this part?.