Nick Gronkiewicz

I think about products the way I think about stories. There’s a protagonist (the user), an antagonist (the mess it’s replacing), and a question worth answering: What decision does this actually support?

Most requests arrive as “we need a dashboard.” Almost none are really dashboard problems. Underneath is usually a definition nobody agreed on, a lead time that’s wrong for half the ordering locations, or four different failure modes stacked into one number. I’d rather spend the first two weeks finding that than the next six months shipping something confidently wrong.

That instinct has become more useful, not less, now that language models consume the same data. An executive, a planner, and an agent all fail differently on bad data—but they all fail. So I build for the consumer, gate the work with human review, and measure adoption instead of assuming it.

The room I enjoy most is the one where a director needs an answer nobody can clearly explain: How is this scorecard calculated? I do the research, broker the logic, and ship something she celebrates. That’s the work I get out of bed for.

Outside work, I’m a published author, a Toastmaster, a cat dad, a math tutor for eight years, a music producer, and a longtime practitioner of Tai Chi, Qi Gong, meditation & breathwork, yoga, and dance.

Deep listening, systems thinking, translating complexity into clarity. Same skills, different rooms.