Adam Gonnerman

My title right now, were I employed, could be "program manager," "project manager," "technical program manager," or technical project manager. Fundamentally, a project manager thinks about planning, organizing, and guiding work so that a specific goal is achieved on time, within scope, and within budget. Unlike operations work, projects have a beginning, middle, and an end. They come and go. Now, I have held other titles. Once, at Scholastic, I held the title of Senior Technical Product Manager. This was a role that blended the fields of project and product management. Despite this experience, there came a time that I wanted a clearer and more current understanding of how strong product managers operate day to day. For this, I arranged to shadow a product manager where I worked. At the time, this was more about curiosity and personal growth, rather than role transition. Now, though, I could see a time coming in which I would want to transition into product...

Early in my career, I was invited to sit in on a meeting with enterprise architects and senior engineers to discuss an integration between a legacy content management system and a new distribution platform. I was there as the (fairly junior) project manager, not the technical authority in the room. The conversation quickly became highly specialized: API contracts, data schemas, caching layers, and system latency thresholds. It was clear I wasn’t the deepest technical expert at the table, and for the first part of the discussion, I mostly listened and felt a little lost. What I began to notice, however, was that while the technical details were sound, the group was implicitly optimizing for architectural elegance rather than delivery timing. No one was explicitly mapping the proposed solution against the external deadline tied to a partner launch. I asked a clarifying question that went something like this (I may have actually rambled a bit): “If we implemented the simpler, interim int...

In a few blog posts here recently I've attempted to share what we can expect with the coming burst of the AI bubble . I think it's a matter of "when," not "if." The clip below explains the consequences of the end of the AI bubble in simple and direct terms. What bothers me about it, besides its inevitability, is that I can't think of what to do to protect myself from the aftermath.   

The most interesting concept I’ve learned about in the past month is “enshittification,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow . He uses it to describe the predictable decline of digital platforms: first they are great to users, then they shift to favor business customers and advertisers, and finally they extract maximum value for shareholders, often degrading the experience for everyone else in the process. The term is blunt, but the framework is sharp. It gave language to something I’ve observed repeatedly in media and technology organizations: product decisions that begin as user-centered gradually become revenue-optimized, and eventually erode trust, quality, and long-term viability. Related to that, I’ve been following Doctorow’s arguments about a potential AI bubble, his view that massive capital is flowing into AI in ways that may not be sustainable relative to real, durable value creation. That perspective helped me separate two things that are often conflated: genuine technological...

 About eleven years ago, I read a book on Positive Psychology that, at the time, had nothing to do with program management or technology delivery. One idea in particular stayed with me: the notion that some people are simply born more prone to depression, that they “did not win the cerebral cortex lottery.” The framing was direct and compassionate. It suggested that for many individuals, depression is not a failure of discipline, mindset, or effort, but a biological predisposition shaped by genetics and brain chemistry. That insight fundamentally changed how I viewed both mental health and human performance. Professionally, it shifted how I interpreted behavior on teams. Before that, I might have unconsciously attributed low energy, pessimism, or withdrawal to disengagement or attitude. Afterward, I became far more careful about separating observable outcomes from assumed intent. I learned to ask more questions, create psychological safety in one-on-ones, and normalize conversatio...

In May 2020, I founded Uberlândia Development Initiatives (UDI) to support the community of Shopping Park in Uberlândia, Brazil—an under-resourced neighborhood of roughly 40,000 residents in a city of more than 680,000. While Uberlândia is a regional hub with a strong university system, public transportation, and economic opportunity, Shopping Park developed for decades without consistent access to basic infrastructure such as sanitation, asphalt, and nearby services. I was particularly moved by the work of Centro de Formação Comunitário São Francisco de Assis (Estação Vida), a community center serving more than 150 children daily with meals, tutoring, sports, music, and life-enriching programming. I established UDI to raise the center’s profile internationally and create a secure, structured way for supporters in the United States and beyond to contribute. I dedicated significant time to forming the nonprofit, navigating the legal process to obtain 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in Dece...

Once when I was in a role supporting a multi-market digital release I was facilitating a meeting that had quickly become circular and unproductive. Engineering was discussing technical dependencies, product was focused on feature completeness, and regional stakeholders were raising compliance concerns. All of this was being discussed at the same time, with people occasionally talking over one another. Each group was using different terminology and optimizing for different risks, which made it difficult to determine what decision actually needed to be made. The conversation kept expanding instead of converging. What to do? I paused the discussion and reframed the session around three concrete questions: What decision are we making today? What constraints are non-negotiable? What options are truly on the table? I then captured each group’s concerns in plain language on a shared Google document, grouping them under timeline, compliance, and technical risk. This structure made overlaps a...