Rick's leadership expertise focuses on effectively guiding organizations toward the successful realization of their objectives — from transformation strategy to delivery at scale, product operating models and agentic AI.
Business Admin Doctoral Candidate · MBA · SA · A-CSM
Transformation · Delivery · Product · AI
Work with Rick
Short-term engagements, fractional leadership, and workshop intensives. Pittsburgh-based, remote-friendly.
Out now on Amazon®
More Clarity, Less Noise
by Rick Pollick
Two volumes — writings on mindset, people, process, product, data, and AI.
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Latest writing
Deadlines are the wrong control variable for software delivery, and AI-accelerated teams prove it weekly. Here is how error budgets and SLOs, borrowed from site reliability engineering, give delivery leaders a reliability-denominated throttle for when to ship and when to stop.
Per-token prices have collapsed while enterprise AI bills keep climbing. The cost of an AI feature is now decided in architecture and code, not in procurement. Here is how delivery leaders turn LLM cost into a first-class engineering KPI using attribution, budgets, unit economics, and cost gates.
Two leaders, two trusted numbers, two metrics that looked great and lied. Episode 2 of Valuestream walks the delivery metrics that were built for a pre-agentic world and quietly stopped working the moment agents started authoring code. The five-metric replacement layer for engineering (outcome latency, reviewer load, rework ratio, time to restore, production confidence) plus dependency density for programs. Full show notes, the framework, the case study, the migration plan, and the Spotify embed.
Acceptance criteria were built for software that behaves the same way every time. AI features do not. Here is how delivery leaders rebuild Definition of Done around evals, graded thresholds, and a quality stack of evals, guardrails, and observability so probabilistic features ship with confidence.
Critical path was built for projects with clean linear chains. Modern programs do not look like that anymore. Dependency density is the metric that actually predicts which clusters will slip, and how to score, track, and act on it.
Most AI agents fail not because the model is bad, but because the agent shows up every morning with no memory, no voice, no priorities, and no idea what your week looks like. A targeted "brain" fixes that. The contextual proxy pattern, the six components, the five-phase loop, the multi-repo and multi-target patterns, the four cadences that grow the "brain" over time, the layered guardrail model, a seven-step getting-started guide, ROI math, and the three failure modes that quietly kill the discipline.
Apps
Built to make delivery, operations, and everyday life a little less boring.
Ezra
Design custom QR codes and get deep analytics — cheap.
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Football FantasyIQ
A full platform for fantasy-football insight — trends, projections, matchup intelligence, powered by the Sleeper API.
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AltaClario
Modern agile analytics for Jira & Azure DevOps — burndown, velocity, capacity, and release health in one workspace.
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Overtone
Records all audio input and output with free transcription, summaries, and sharing — Mac and Windows today, iOS and Android coming.
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ShadoWatchr
Mac threat assessments and active defense in one place.
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PlacePin
Record where you've been, build custom lists, and share with friends — with AI to surface insight on each place, plan trips, and keep everything organized.
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Episode 2 — Live
Where value actually flows.
Episode 2: Trust the Number That Hurts. The metrics that lie to you in the agentic era. Why DORA and critical path are both failing the same way, the five-metric replacement layer for engineering, and the dependency-density score that finally tells the truth about whether a program will ship. 20 minutes.
What people say
“Rick is dynamic, thoughtful, energetic, inventive, inspirational, articulate, consultative, and driven. He excels at breaking down complex challenges, driving transformation, and building team capability through innovative problem-solving.”
Mark Wuslich — Colleague - Product Manager & Scrum Master — UPMC Enterprises
Elsewhere
Select Technical Projects
Open-source code and experiments on GitHub.
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Linktree
Everywhere else to find Rick.
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Pittsburgh Technology Council
Regional tech community and programming.
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ProductTank Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh's product community — meetups, talks, and demos for PMs and product-minded folks.
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#PittAgile Meetup
Pittsburgh's local agile practitioner community.
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Portfolio Video
A short walkthrough of delivery leadership work.
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Get in touch
Advisory, fractional leadership, AI strategy, or just a coffee chat. Book a 30-minute slot, drop an email, or grab the resume.
