Matthew Suber

A lot of people call me Hew.

Two journalists raised me in ATL. So I start with what's actually true, ask what caused it, and remember somebody eventually has to do something about it. Some people call that first principles. It's just the house I grew up in.

I watch, I ask, I try something, I structure it. If it works, I circle back and make it repeatable. That's most of what I do, in every room I'm in.

I like being around people who are into their shit stuff. I like teaching, and I learn in the doing. Someone asks a question I already know the answer to and the asking shows me something I'd stopped seeing. Half the time I hear my own advice out loud and realize I should be taking it. I like when somebody leaves with a wider set of moves than they came in with, myself included.

I've done product work for seventeen years, mostly at companies you've used. I came in through design and kept ending up further upstream. The hard part is almost never the design, it's the decision, so now I help teams find that part before they commit to it. Most of what I've built otherwise, I built because I wanted it to exist and nobody else was making it.

I keep coming back to what people want before anyone calls it a problem. That's cost me plenty. It's also the whole reason I'm any good at this.

I write down what I see so I stop losing it. Turns out that's also how I find out what I think.

A few names, a few rooms, the same person.