This is the first post in a series about lessons I've learned over my career. Today I work as an engineering manager at Google ( This is a personal project. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer, Google. ), but for more than 15 years I was a consultant, working with companies across many industries. Along the way I ran into problems I couldn't fully solve at the time. Many times I had to deliver solutions that worked, but with limitations, because there wasn't enough time, technology or people.

With AI I no longer have those limitations. I can explore different solutions and make decisions based on data, and I'd like to finally solve these problems and share what I learned, even if in the end the one reading this is another AI.

The financial engine nobody "should" touch

I want to start with a problem I ran into many times.…