Andrews DeanField Notes
How I think, not just what I shipped
Shorter, opinionated pieces that sit alongside the case studies — evaluation and trust in AI products, product judgment when you replace a legacy spreadsheet, and the odd note on craft.
Shipping AI you can trust
How would you know if your AI was quietly wrong?
The skill that separates people who demo AI from people who ship it isn't building the model. It's knowing when the model is wrong.
Why I made an AI say "I don't know" more often
Treating an honest blank as a correct answer, and a confident invention as the worst failure, is where responsible AI actually lives.
The demo that lied to me
An AI improvement isn't real until it beats the noise floor: the amount your system wobbles on its own, with nothing changed.
The bug that remembered the wrong thing
A system that silently does the wrong thing is more dangerous than one that visibly does nothing. Here's how I nearly shipped one.
Replacing the spreadsheet
Every PM wants to kill the spreadsheet
The messy Excel file running a critical process is the most honest requirements document you'll ever be handed. Read it before you replace it.
Have you sat in the room your product is used in?
Users don't live in your forms. They live in the moment your product gets used. Design that moment and the forms almost design themselves.
The shape of your data is a UX decision
The best user-experience work is often invisible, because it's the mistake the user can no longer make. A typed scorecard deleted a whole family of bugs before anyone touched the app.
Enforce the rule. Respect the room.
Good products don't just encode the policy. They encode how mature people actually apply it, including when they choose to bend it.
Product craft
A different home screen for every role
Every role opens your app with a different question in mind. Role design isn't a permissions table. It's empathy, made concrete, one landing page at a time.
I shipped it. Then I rebuilt it 22 times.
Launch isn't the finish line. It's the moment your roadmap finally touches reality, and reality starts talking back.
Contact
Let's talk.
If you're building an AI-first product org — or you need someone who can take a vague mandate and return a shipped, adopted product — I'd like to hear about it.
hello@andrewsdean.com · Noida (Delhi NCR), India