exploring all strange edges of the search space; embracing hackathon as method
1. Dialogos Labs
What: Creative product studio developing local-first AI tools and governance experiences, including Atelier (flagship AI agents collaboration platform — currently building in stealth)
Why: We need AI development that prioritizes community sovereignty over corporate extraction. Dialogos Labs creates private, beautiful, meaningful AI tools that communities can own and control.
Technical: Local-first architecture, voice UI/UX, real-time AI collaboration
Community: Regular salons, educative workshops, collaborative AI projects, value-centered design
2. Storytelling Through Interactive Web Experiences & Games
la percée (visual novel game)
[Link to demo] | Github repository
What: Ren'Py-based visual novel transforming ML infrastructure decisions into community narrative experiences.
Technical: Game development, web deployment, custom pixel art
the work is mysterious and important (immersive web experience)
[Link to demo] | Github repository
What: HTML/CSS & Javascript coded web experience based on the Apple TV-series Severence. Used to showcase and present AI/ML infrastructure developments and product designs for upcoming quarter.
Technical: Game development, web deployment, custom pixel art
3. Cultural Community Building
نمشي ناكل (Dine for Sudan) | Love Starts In the Kitchen
Dine for Sudan (نمشي ناكل) served as a fundraiser for the humanitarian crisis happening in Sudan post-revolution. The event was the first experimental project under Dialogos Labs (then: zoleh events) a community initiative dedicated to organizing third space events and experiences.
We had space at an intimate cafe cooperative of 40 guests, which provided a similar feel and space for intimacy that would experience in a family’s home. Proceeds raised went directly to the Sudan Solidarity Collective.
web-app prototyping & event design for نمشي ناكل
"Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.” -Anthony Bourdain
visual research and writing assets
Mama Sitana’s home kissed the outskirts of Omdurman. The year was 2003 and we drove to visit her on a day so hot sand could have burned holes through leather. The off path she lived on was washed in tones of sepia, though the golds and browns that day were vivid. Baba’s embrace at the entrance lasted the longest. When it was my turn to greet her, she palmed my cheeks in her hands.
“ya Sarah,” she greeted with a smile. Almost sixty years of life separated us. Beside her curved lips, scars covered the landscape of her cheeks. They were delicate and intricately carved, smooth transitions like the crossing waters of the white and blue Nile.
An earthy mixture of smoky incense and fuul and addas stewing in the kitchen warmed my nostrils as we walked into the living room. The architecture of Sudanese homes always meant multiple rooms for multiple beds. There wasn’t a single household that existed where less than two people dwelled.
Black tea was poured with steamed milk, served with traditional biscuits so rich they crumbled on fingers before reaching tongue. For hours, I studied her hands and gestures as she talked. Her movement regal, intonation slow and intentional. My broken Arabic barely enough to sew together the stories of life in Sudan. Most conversation left to imagination, missing pages filled by the mantras I grew up on: God willing. All praise to Allah. God is great.
In the background you could just notice the fan softly humming in and out. Married with it was the constant tick of the wall clock to remind us that the moments were constantly measured. Instantaneous, like each story that builds a lineage.
4. Sample creative tech community-hosted salons & writing projects
search space poetics: a creative’s guide to building end-to-end ai/ml products (june 2025)
“Innate curiosity concerns our desire to solve problems and generate final productive solutions. But curiosity is not to be confused with wonder. Wondering is the pursuit of a process, not the attainment of a product. It is a quest for following the logos as ultimate concern, not the products of the logos as ultimate concern.” — John Vervaeke, Mentoring the Machine
Product is a creative process. A lens to look through as we interact with problems we are trying to solve. Everyone’s role on a development team is to build an iteration of the end product. Each layer being built creates the holistic experience of the product, filtered by the end experience which will be consumed by a user. To consider the vast layers of interactions and ways of relating to technology, design, and the desired outcomes of a product means there must be a well tended space to consider and play with outcomes.
The end can be understood in its constituent parts (the back-end code as a product layer, data as a product layer, integrations as a product layer, the design as a product layer, etc). What varies is the aspect you’re concerned with directly contributing to as it relates to an outcome.
Product should not be localized to a single individual, but be a distribution of concern across a team. Building artificial intelligence products and how they interact with the world brings in further challenges. Defining and testing how autonomous agents respond and interact with their environment is an existential question as much as it is a technical one. Once we delegate functions from human to technology, how does this augment the role of humans?
Excerpt from Chapter 2, Explore:
I love the analogy of the search space when thinking about a Product Manager (PM)’s role as broad initializers of what is possible. There is a cognitive psychology concept by Vervaeke et. al (2012) which stands out to me as a metaphor for problem solving called relevance realization. In problem solving modes we often are in spaces where the operating container is undefined or we need to hypothesize the spaces to direct, how to simultaneously direct and prune the search toward a focused aspect of the end goal. What is the initial set of hyperparemeters that are telling of the problem? How do we direct ourselves toward that goal to ensure it is comprehensive, complete, and has been deliberated? Often the mechanics and spaces we can span when we think about a problem can become combinatorically explosive.
A valuable PM will help to prune and explore the space in important ways that provide the right fitted focus toward a vision, and the subsequent iterative aspects of the goal toward the end state of the space, aka the “what” and the “why”. This ends up building the scope of a project and that an idea will lay out. They will help provide contextual relevance to the team. Landing on a hypothesis of what is right requires a combination of understanding the product, the customer, and the market. There are also the mechanics of this directing that could be broken up into the communication which govern getting the point across. When to speak, who to speak to, what language or frameworks to use (we’ll touch on this more in the second chapter).
In other words, PMs impose constraints, and this makes the borders of the spaces we operate in as a team less fuzzy. Collaborating in building the container. Both expanding and contracting the ways we can configure the space. How the boundaries are accordions. Sometimes the decisions an ML engineer or data scientist makes on how they will test or implement. But it also helps to rapidly frame the problem for other stakeholders (such as the executive team) when providing a summary of what has led up to this point. The entire team chisels, refines, and negotiates through the container with every business or technical decision.
creative storytelling workshop for product managers (mar 2025)
I'd like to touch on the more abstract aspects of how PMs can tell more memorable stories in their presentations (thus turning them into performance pieces) by exploring the following creative questions:
- What do you really care about right now?
- How do you really care right now?
I emphasize "really" and "right now" to focus on what truly is on your mind these days, outside the context of the projects you work on—and to bring liveliness, passion, and uniqueness to the ways you package your end message.
To explore the first part of making a piece memorable to others, you have to start with what would make it memorable to you.
Starting with exploring what you really care about right now... There are probably many, many things. Too many things to name. I find a lot of inspiration in looking at presenting as a means of curation.
What is curation? The definition I have here is: curation is the act of gathering disparate materials and presenting them together in a way that tells a story, adds meaning, or creates a new mood or space.
When you enter a museum, when you go to an event, when you read a book of poetry—these are all curated by the artist or creators. And as PMs, we can do the same with our messaging to make it unique and memorable.
Take inventory of your latest set of interests:
- As PMs, we have way more creative freedom than we think we do, and we can use this to our benefit to create memorable moments for our audience—breaking the expected shell or mold of what people expect. No templates necessary.
- This could start the beginning of a creative process where an outcome is more interesting than it would have been if you followed the rules of a templated presentation.
I emphasize choosing our own datasets and personal corpora of inspiration for how we put something together.
Picking the "right" source material—material that feels right—is perhaps the most important decision in this generative era.
A really small example of sources that have been inspiring me lately includes the following pieces across technology: the dichotomy I've been experiencing of yearning for handmade web experiences alongside the potential language models bring to creating a new era of home-cooked software and new developers; mindful internet use; and old flash games like Rollerboy 2.
Ultimately, as PMs, one of the ways we can stand out in our messaging and branding is to curate our own corpora and keep our sources fresh and relevant. This quote summarizes this really well: curating your own corpora allows you to have hyper-specific control over the tone, vibe, content, ethics, language, and poetics of that space.
So great—you have your corpora of things that you care about. To make the combination of those things memorable, you can now consider: how do you really care right now? With the new age of how product is also evolving, working with generative systems (such as generative code editors, vibe coding, rapid prototyping, or even creating with Claude) all turn humans into curators, as we have a stake in selecting the outputs that we find compelling, interesting, beautiful, or poetic in our possibility space. This exercise is as simple as visualizing via a moodboard what you want to create. And it's also fun to be experimental with the combination of these elements—this approach might not land for every utilitarian, but our goal is to make an experience memorable. For PMs, this practice also encourages us to keep improving and iterating on how we deliver messages.
how to build anything guide (feb 2025)
"The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills." —Arthur Koestler in "The Act of Creation":
people-pleasing like a neural network (feb 2025)
“AI is neither artificial nor intelligence. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are not autonomous, rational, or able to discern anything without extensive, computationally intensive training with large datasets or predefined rules and rewards. In fact, artificial intelligence as we know it depends entirely on a much wider set of political and social structures. And due to the capital required to build AI at scale and the ways of seeing that it optimizes AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests. In this sense, artificial intelligence is a registry of power.” — Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford
- Introduction to sycophancy, mechanistic interpretability, and AI safety for the layperson
- Exploring the technical of sycophancy and why it’s a problematic feature when it comes to truth-seeking for democratic systems and political use cases of AI
- Relating to philosophical implications of why humans do this
- Actionable tips to prompt a system from a user POV to reduce sycophancy
Conclusion: Most important algorithmic systems are not what has been encoded in the machines but what we cultivate in ourselves. By implementing diversity-aware takes, perspective balancing mechanisms, and democratic evaluation metrics, developers and users can create systems that enhance rather than undermine democratic functioning
metta & compassionate mind training (nov 2024)
Mettā means loving-kindness, friendliness, goodwill, benevolence. It can also be understood as a strong wish for the welfare and happiness of others or oneself. The practice is to develop and radiate mettā toward yourself. This means forming a sincere intention or wish that you be truly happy and free from suffering and remaining with this wish as the meditation object, returning to it whenever the mind becomes distracted.
beyond LLMs (feb 2024)
If we think in terms of complex systems, we realize that human beings are not the only actors in the world. All human action, must take into account that intentional action is only one vector in a set of other, non-countable vectors, whose regulation is not foreseeable. – Miguel Benasayag, The Tyranny of Algorithms
hosted post-presentation discussions:
- Critical think spaces
- Dialogical conflict
- Education into what these technologies actually are, and how to use them
machine learning product management: a generalist’s path into artificial intelligence (nov 2022)
Since this role comes with agency, it’s important to not concentrate attention on the wrong means, ends, or aspects of a problem. Diffuse any hierarchical power games that come with the role immediately, or run the risk of losing insight into the horizontality that enables you to flow in and out of multiple processes of the product’s development and implementation into a problem space. The antithesis of progress is in a viper grip on control.
Because product enables a larger surface area to explore a multitude of problems across a technical team and business organization, Product Management is an attention problem. Given the wide scope potential of the position, there’s a multitude of ways to contribute. From detailed implementation technicalities to the wider scope of the way the product will be consumed by the user and perceived in the market. The craft of product sense is less in memorizing a set of frameworks or approaches, and more in the value and vision you bring to the collective. I find there are many aspects of this field that allow for creativity in the role, as an individual often has to adapt to the abstractions of a technical team.