It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature.
Why the loudest voices aren’t always the most useful ones.
If you’ve ever felt out of step inside organisations, you’re probably in the right place. If you haven’t, you may be exactly who this is for.
For a long time I thought the discomfort I felt in organisations was a personal failing.
I came into technology before it learned the language of power. Before engineers were expected to narrate the future, disrupt industries, or sell a story about changing the world. You got into this line of work because you liked systems. Because you couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
Computers were appealing because they were consistent. They had structure. Rules. If something broke, there was a reason. If you understood the system well enough, you could usually explain what went wrong.
Organisations weren’t like that.
As technology professionalised, it also learned this “new” language. One borrowed from finance, politics, and class systems. Fluency in that language began to matter more than understanding the system itself. Confidence travelled faster than correctness. Volume held the door for clarity, but clarity rarely entered.
I’ve spent most of my career working in the messy middle. The space between “this could be something” and “this actually works”.
I’ve worked in startups, consultancies, and scale-ups, and held leadership roles across software, infrastructure, hardware, and product. In almost all of them, I kept noticing the same pattern of struggle emerging over the last decade:
There is growing social permission to optimise for power, capital, and narrative first, while treating the product and the people using it as secondary concerns.
If it’s not already obvious, I’m neurodivergent. That’s not a brand or a positioning angle here, but it is the lens I’m looking through. Being allowed to be put down the mask in the right professional environments has led to some of the most meaningful, enduring professional relationships I have, and I value those deeply.
But it can also make people uncomfortable. Talking about a system and what you notice about it can feel — to those inside it or shaping it — like a personal critique. It’s often easier to reward confidence than curiosity, and easier to mistake fluency for insight.
Systems rarely fail for purely technical reasons. They fail because of how technology, power, incentives, communication, and human behaviour interact — and because only some of those forces are allowed to speak openly.
What Marginal Observations is about
You’ll mostly find long-form writing on:
Leadership under real constraints
What happens when authority meets uncertainty, and why clarity often degrades as organisations grow.Technology as a social system
Architecture, process, and tooling as expressions of power, trust, fear, and incentives.Early-stage reality
The gap between how startups are talked about and how they actually survive first contact with the real world.Engineering restraint
Why most problems are not solved by more abstraction, more process, or more people.Neurodivergent friction in professional spaces
Literal thinking, social mismatch, and the cost of pretending not to notice obvious things.Power, empathy, and accountability
Where they align, where they drift apart, and what breaks when they do.
Some posts will be reflective. Some will be technical. Some will be uncomfortable. Most will be written slowly, after sitting with something that didn’t quite make sense for a while.
Why write this now
After years of building inside other people’s organisations, I now run a neurodivergent-led, neurodivergent-friendly product studio. We’re deliberately selective about who we work with, not out of taste or status, but because the conditions for creativity matter.
In the right environments, something noticeable happens. People slow down. They ask better questions. They say things they’ve been holding back for years. More than once, someone has described it as coming up for air for the first time in a long time.
Those environments aren’t defined by industry, ambition, or funding stage. They’re defined by a willingness to be challenged early, to separate confidence from clarity, and to treat curiosity as something to protect, rather than something to smooth over.
Our selectivity came from experience, not principle. We know organisations don’t usually push different thinkers out of cruelty. They do it because challenge creates discomfort, and discomfort is often mistaken for risk. It’s easier to reward agreement than curiosity, and easier to surround yourself with people who reassure you than people who slow you down.
Writing gives me room to slow down and make sense of what I’m seeing. Publishing keeps me honest about it.
More soon.