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The Rarest Answer
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I asked 14 engineers their career goals this week. More than half said management or team lead within two years. One candidate (currently supervising two junior developers) told me his goal was to lead a large engineering team within two years. I get the instinct. Management looks like progress. Bigger title, more authority, cleaner…
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What a Promise to Pay Is Worth
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A debtor sends a WhatsApp message. “I’ll pay you on Friday.” In a manual collections process, that message gets logged. An agent marks the account. Someone follows up on Saturday. Often, nobody follows up at all — because there are 200 other accounts and Friday’s promises pile up with no system tracking them. In…
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The Push-Back That Wasn’t About Being Right
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A candidate told me about the day his manager wanted to push a feature straight to production. Tight deadline. Skip the review. Skip the tests. Get it live. He didn’t say no. He came back with a feature flag, a controlled rollout that would let them test with a limited group of users before…
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The AI Tell
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Six months ago we made AI use mandatory for every engineer at Ara Pay. Not encouraged. Mandatory. So I started asking every candidate the same question: how do you actually use AI day to day? Most talk about Copilot autocomplete. Some mention generating scaffolding or writing tests faster. That’s fine. But occasionally someone answers…
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The Word Everyone Uses
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I asked 19 engineers in 5 days what their biggest professional strength was. Twelve said ownership. After the twelfth time I stopped keeping count. But I started listening more carefully to what came after the word. One candidate described a production deployment that had loaded incorrect data. He worked overnight, pushed a clean release,…
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The Empathetic Collection Protocol (ECP)
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What Is the Empathetic Collection Protocol? And why everyone gets AI collections wrong. It started with a fundamental misunderstanding. When companies first approach AI for accounts receivable management and debt collections, they always ask the same question: “How many scenarios can your system handle? How many response templates do you have?” They assume that…
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What We Learned About Our Customers in Q2 (And Why It Changed Everything)
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Three months ago, I was convinced we needed to be talking to CFOs and Heads of Collections. After all, they control the budgets and make the big decisions, right? Wrong. Our Q2 data told a completely different story. While senior collections leaders gave us an 18.9% LinkedIn acceptance rate, Country Managers hit 43.2%. But…
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The AI Competence Illusion
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A few years ago, I recommended “Crucial Conversations” to a team member, Gabriel, because he struggled with having difficult conversations. For months afterward, he’d excitedly announce: “I’m having a ‘crucial conversation’ today!” Unfortunately, this didn’t translate to tangibly better conversations. Gabriel seemingly knew the theory, but lacked the understanding that creates actual competence. Gap…
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How Business Models Drive Ethics (Whether We Like It or Not)
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We spend so much time debating whether companies like OpenAI and Facebook, or their leaders, are “good” or “bad.” We should change the narrative and ask: What are the core revenue drivers? How is the focus on exponential growth through these drivers shaping behavior? In the absence of impossibly high corporate governance standards, business…
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Why I Was Fighting the Wrong Battles in Negotiations
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As a founder, getting back up when my legs were swept from under me became second nature during my startup journey. Prospects ghost, customers delay payments, investors pass on your round (without saying it) – and somehow it’s only 3 pm on a Tuesday. These constant challenges bred a protective coping mechanism that emerged…