Cheers! I'm Rand.

I come from a background in (computational) linguistics, and have spent the last 25+ years working in or around the intersection of AI (though we would never have called it that back then), PLT, information retrieval, and dev tools and platforms.

Shipped platform, AI, and security primitives at Heroku, AWS, Vercel, Netlify, HashiCorp, and GitHub, scaling usage from early adopters to millions of engineers.

• At GitHub, I led ML/AI, Code Search, and Code Understanding during the Microsoft acquisition and the dawn of transformer LLMs. Delivered foundational aspects of the code analysis, understanding, and modeling systems within GitHub.
• At Heroku, launched Heroku AI with Managed Inference and a breadth of agentic capabilities that propelled the platform into the modern AI era. Previously designed and shipped Private Spaces, Heroku Metrics, Heroku Kafka, and iterations of the networking infrastructure.

I believe in the following as the core principles of product management as a practice:

• Deeply understand the needs and opportunities in serving users, the market, and the business.
• Establish hypotheses and curate prioritized initiatives to address those needs and opportunities.
• Deliver outcomes for the business and its customers.

Ethos: Leave the world better than you found it; thrive while doing so.