A letter to myself, before day one

“I may have something of interest to you, Johann. Would be great to connect 👍🏼.”

That’s the whole message. It arrived on LinkedIn out of nowhere, from a recruiter named Joe — which, given how often these things come in under a borrowed first name, might even be his real one. No company, no role, no details. The kind of message you’d normally archive without a second thought.

This one ends with me leaving a job I like, at a company I have nothing bad to say about, for a company whose name Joe wouldn’t even tell me. I had to find that out myself. Well — myself, and an AI.

I’m writing this before my first day of work. I haven’t signed the contract yet; I don’t even know my start date. Writing the company blog before I officially have the job sounds backwards. Maybe it is. I’m doing it anyway, because I’m carrying around more thoughts than I can hold, and because I want a record — something to read back in six months and hold up against whatever actually happened.

So this is two things at once. The story of how a two-line message turned into a job, and a letter to a future version of me.

A confession before we start: I’ve never written a blog post in my life. I’m starting now on purpose — writing pins down ideas that are otherwise just vapor. So here I am, thinking out loud.

From three breadcrumbs to a company

I asked Joe what his message was about. It turned out to be a Lead Engineer role at a small but established company: the first cornerstone of an AI-first development team — one that builds software mostly by directing AI instead of typing every line by hand. Joe wouldn’t name it. He gave me breadcrumbs instead — Danish sports tech, around since 2012, 400+ venues across 18 countries.

So I handed the breadcrumbs to Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. In seconds it named the company: GolfNext, in Ry, a short drive from where I live in Denmark. They make the self-service kit golf clubs run on — more on that later.

That little exercise is more or less the job description. If you can point an AI at three vague clues and have it reconstruct the company behind them, that’s the work. So I replied with a fully AI-generated message, openly labeled:

“Full disclosure, Joe: this reply is AI-generated. Felt fitting for an AI-first pitch — and yes, I let the agent do the detective work too. 😄”

They wrote back. A few days later I drove out to Ry and spent an hour at the GolfNext office, and by the time I left I knew I wanted it. The tell was the first thing they said when I sat down: “Let’s just have a chat here and talk openly.” No theater.

Before committing, I wanted to know exactly what I’d be walking into, so I asked. Thomas Herskind, who runs product at GolfNext, sent over an overview of the systems they run today. I read it and wrote back with everything I thought was worth doing first, point by point. It ran long. Very long.

Thomas’s reply was six words. “Congrats on your first novel, Johann!”

I laughed out loud. You learn a lot about a place from how it teases you before you’ve even signed.

The 70 ideas before this one

None of which explains why a two-line message with no details got my attention in the first place. For that, I have to rewind a few months — and first tell you who’s writing, since this is the internet.

I’m a generalist. A full-stack engineer who never minded picking up whatever a project happened to need. Sixteen years in: a lot of backend, a lot of web apps, a few years leading a team, and co-creator of scrumlr, an open-source tool teams use to run retrospectives — those meetings where you look back at what went well and what didn’t. I’ve never been the engineer who loves technology for its own sake. What pulls me is the other end of the wire: the user, the design, the value, the thing that makes somebody’s day a little easier. And getting there without a lot of detours. That’s the CV in a paragraph. The itch is the part it can’t carry.

I’d had an itch for a while to build something of my own. Anything that might grow into a business, really — and an excuse to push Claude as far as it would go and find out how much real software it could actually build. The first project came out of a pet peeve I’d carried across jobs. Release notes — the “what changed” list that’s supposed to be for the people using the software — keep getting dumped into commit messages, the terse notes developers leave each other. “Upgrade ESLint to version 10.” Who is that for? So I built a small product that lets you write proper change entries in plain language, right next to the code, and hand them to the product managers who should own them. Built from scratch in about two weeks — the parts users see, the backend behind them, the pipeline that ships updates on its own. All of it, with AI doing most of the typing.

That felt good enough that I got greedy and reached for something much bigger: an agent that keeps software projects alive. Maintaining them, extending them, mostly on its own, with the release-notes tool as its first patient. That’s where I hit a wall, and the wall taught me more than most of my finished projects did.

Some of it was scope. I’d wrapped a full product around something that should have started as a small experiment. But the deeper lesson was about the tool. Today’s AI is genuinely brilliant at a blank page, and at small, well-bounded changes. It gets shaky the moment you ask it to tear into big chunks of core logic. It starts to hallucinate — confidently inventing things that aren’t there. It never quite cleans up after itself. Old context lingers and creeps back into the next attempt. A build that ambitious needs a clear plan for how you’ll get there before you write a single line, and holding that plan together on my own, in stolen evenings and weekends, just wasn’t something I could pull off. That project is parked, not buried.

So I changed tactics. I put Claude to work as a sparring partner on smaller things, the kind I could finish in a couple of weeks. I’d pitch an idea; it would go research the market and, more often than not, come back with the same answer — crowded, already funded, don’t bother. Painful. Also useful.

After about 70 of those, I stopped pitching and asked the obvious question: so what should I do? The answer was refreshingly blunt. Stop hunting for a clever product. Find someone with a real problem and help them build a software-driven process around it that saves them serious time. And since it knows how I work, it sketched out roughly what that would look like. A few months later, Joe’s two lines landed in my inbox — and the role behind them, once I asked, turned out to be a near-perfect match for that sketch. The message with no details was the thing I’d been told to go find.

What it’s actually about

High time I told you what I’d actually found. GolfNext builds self-service tools and hardware for golf clubs — picture a ball dispenser members work themselves at the range, or a system that takes the fiddly, error-prone business of selling and redeeming vouchers and makes it calm. For years, capable external partners built most of that software, and it carried the company a long way. The shift now, as they laid it out to me, is that GolfNext wants the engineering know-how to live inside the company: a team that understands the whole landscape from the inside, for the kind of steady, long-term growth that comes from owning what you depend on. No verdict on the people who built it so far — just the natural next step for a company that plans to be around for a long time.

I’m one of the first pieces of that. The brief: absorb the landscape — the same one Thomas previewed in that overview — take over development bit by bit, and before long help build a team around it.

Here’s a confession that sounds odd in an engineering blog: I’ve barely written code by hand in months. Call it half a year on my own projects, a couple of months at work. Not because I stopped building. The building just moved up a level. More of my day now goes into directing AI, reviewing what it gives back, and designing the guardrails that keep its output safe and correct. It’s where the craft is heading — and it’s exactly the team GolfNext is asking me to build. Nobody can honestly tell you where all this lands; the ground moves every few weeks. But the direction is clear enough to point at, and pointing at it is the job.

That’s the what. Before the how, there’s a goodbye I owe.

Leaving a good thing

First, the honest part nobody enjoys writing. Saying yes here means leaving Salling Group — one of Denmark’s largest retailers — and I don’t want a single word of this read as a complaint. Salling was the perfect first step when I landed in Denmark: a real culture, people who genuinely look out for each other, work I’m proud of. I shipped things that mattered, under deadlines with no room for error, next to engineers I learned plenty from. I made good friends there. Part of me is sad to go.

The reason I’m moving isn’t a flaw in the place. It’s a difference in what I’m built for. At a company that size, every decision gets weighed by a lot of thoughtful people, which is exactly how a big retailer earns and keeps people’s trust. But it means being close to the wheel is rare, and steering quickly rarer still. I want the wheel. I want to point at a direction and move. That itch is most of why I started building things on the side in the first place, and it’s precisely what this new role hands me. Leaving a good thing for the right reason is still leaving a good thing. Both are true at once.

The goals I’m setting for myself

Now for the how. The wall I hit on that side project is the whole reason the goals below look the way they do. If AI is strongest inside clear boundaries, the answer isn’t to prompt harder. It’s to build a landscape where the boundaries are obvious — where context is cheap to hand over, where a change is easy to scope small, where the guardrails catch what the model gets wrong before a human has to. Because that’s where I think this is all heading: the scarce resource in software becomes how fast anyone — human or AI — can pick up a context they’ve never seen. If a new engineer and a fresh AI session can both understand a service quickly, work can start immediately, by whoever picks it up. If they can’t, every task starts with archaeology. Most of what follows is really about that one sentence.

One disclaimer that matters: I haven’t started yet. These are the standards I’ll hold myself to, not decisions I get to make alone — the order and the priorities get worked out with the people who’ve been running these systems for years.

Make the work visible. This blog is goal one. When you’re building knowledge inside a team, the worst thing you can do is lock it away in private channels and individual heads. Writing it down in the open forces clarity, pulls in good people, keeps everyone honest. So it exists now. Future me: if these posts went quiet, take it as a warning sign.

Rebuild the understanding, not just the access. Taking over from an external team isn’t really about collecting credentials and passwords. It’s about rebuilding the understanding from the inside. So: every account checked and put in my name, every doc read and sharpened until I can operate and release anything in the stack without phoning a friend. That’s the unglamorous half of the ninety days, and it’s the half everything else waits on.

Build a landscape everyone can build in. This is the one I care about most. Concretely:

• A five-minute cold start. Fresh laptop to running code: understand the project, run it locally, hit a live endpoint, pass the test suite, all in under five minutes. It’s the on-ramp to building and testing, not a rulebook for how to write code. Future me, this one is measurable — go time it.
• Docs that live right next to the code, so context is one directory away instead of one Slack message away.
• Automation for anything we’d otherwise do by hand twice.
• Technical debt paid down where it’s genuinely in the way — not a spring clean, just the things standing in the road.
• A shared kit of prompts and presets for the AI, so everyone starts from the same proven setup instead of rebuilding it each time. That’s what turns “AI-first” into actual shared tooling instead of a slogan.

The point isn’t to be the only people who can build. It’s to be the quality gate that turns a rough idea into something you can trust, and the helping hand that makes building safe and easy for everyone else.

Stay on the keys. I said this to Joe before I’d said it to anyone at GolfNext, because it would save us both time. I’ve led a team before, twenty-four people, and I stepped back to building on purpose. “If ‘Lead’ means setting technical direction while still building, I’m very in. If it means drifting away from the code, I’m the wrong guy.” That line started as a filter for the job. It’s a goal now. Future me: if you’ve drifted, you know what to do about it.

Hire excellent people, and then trust them. Not in the first ninety days, and not my call alone, but it’s where this is headed, and it shapes the early calls. A small team of excellent people needs almost no process. Keep the bar high even when you’re short-handed. That part, at least, isn’t me projecting my reading list onto them: when hiring came up in Ry, they told me they’d rather run short-handed for a few months than bring in the wrong person just to add capacity. It told me more about the place than any pitch could have. Hand people context instead of approvals. Judge the work, not the noise. Default to yes, and stop to debate only at the doors you can’t walk back through. And leave room — real room — to spitball, to argue, to build things that might not work. The creative, playful time isn’t a reward you earn once the serious work is done. In this line of work, it is the serious work.

A compass, not a rulebook

The goals are the plan. Underneath the plan sits a compass, and it’s worth showing you, because it’ll shape how I steer.

What I won’t show up with is a manifesto. I don’t believe a culture can be written into existence. It grows out of its environment and the people in it, day by day, in a thousand small moments nobody writes down — which is why it can only be led by example, never enforced. We’ll work out GolfNext’s actual values together, in the doing. And I mean together in both directions. I’ll arrive with convictions — this post is full of them — but I expect to be changed as much as I change anything, and to pick up ways of working I haven’t even considered yet.

Part of it I owe to inovex, the German consultancy where I spent seven years — the longest stretch of the sixteen. They had a triangle — Employees, Customers, Economy — and they meant every corner of it: fair pay, the freedom to choose the right tools for the job, sane and agile ways of working, genuine care for the people doing the work. Most of that I still hold to. My own emphasis just sits a little differently. Where their triangle puts employee happiness, mine puts Craft. Not because happiness doesn’t matter, but because I’ve come to think it grows out of doing great work together, rather than being something you can aim at head-on.

So the three points I steer by are Customer (the aim — solving the problem people would genuinely miss), Craft (the swing — building it well, and getting better by building it), and Capital (the long game — staying healthy enough to finish the round, and keeping the knowledge in the house so nothing important lives in a single head). Lean too hard on any one and you slice; get all three swinging together and the ball drops.

What I’ve been reading, and what I took from it

A fair number of the goals above — the high bar, the trust, the near-absence of process — I got from No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s book on how Netflix is run. The argument, compressed: push talent density up until you have a team of excellent people, use candor to keep them honest with each other, and then start taking the rules away — because most rules exist to stop bad outcomes from average performers, and once you haven’t got those, the rules cost more than they save.

The bit I keep coming back to is the expense policy. It comes down to a single instruction: act in the best interest of the company. That looks like a policy about receipts. It isn’t. It’s a statement about who’s responsible. A rulebook hands you an answer somebody else worked out once, for a situation that might not be yours anymore. One instruction hands you the goal and makes you work out the answer for the situation you’re actually standing in. That’s more weight to carry. It’s also what makes you a real part of the thing instead of an executor of other people’s decisions — and it’s where creativity and initiative come from. You don’t get an unexpected good idea out of somebody following steps.

The part that has to be practiced. None of that works without candor, and candor doesn’t come free — for anyone. The pull toward smoothing things over is universal, and caring without saying the thing is the failure mode that feels kind and isn’t. Take away the rules and keep the politeness and you don’t get freedom. You get a team quietly drifting, with everyone guessing.

So I read Radical Candor as well, Kim Scott’s book on exactly this — useful feedback needs both halves at once: you have to actually care about the person, and you have to actually say the thing. Hence this commitment, in writing, where anyone can hold me to it: expect me to be very clear about what I think, what I’ve decided, and why — including when the answer is that I got it wrong.

And yet — not a culture you can copy. One caveat over all of it. I don’t want to import Netflix’s culture wholesale. It grew out of a particular company, in a particular market, at a particular size, and plenty of what makes it work there doesn’t travel. The book’s famous sharp edge travels worst of all: the keeper test, where anyone a manager wouldn’t fight to keep is let go with a generous severance. I’d leave that part behind entirely. Talent density earned by hiring carefully is a different thing from talent density maintained by cutting — and an edge that hard has very American roots. It’s not how I’d want a small team in Denmark to feel. There’s just as much worth taking from how good people at companies like Google or Apple have built and run their teams — and those cultures disagree with Netflix’s in places, on purpose. Ours will be its own thing — worked out in Ry, not copied in from California. The real test of any of this is what everybody does when nobody’s enforcing anything.

Which lands back where the expense policy started. Don’t adopt somebody else’s rulebook. Adopt the habit of asking what’s genuinely best here, right now, with the people we’ve actually got — and stay willing to change the answer when the situation does.

A note to future me

By the time you read this, you’ll know everything I don’t. The start date. Whether those first ninety days went to plan. Which of these goals survived contact with reality, and which were sweetly naive. Some of it will look obvious in hindsight. Some of it will look funny.

I wanted it written down before the job could start shaping my answers — while it’s all still conviction, before it hardens into experience.

Thomas already joked that my first long reply to him read like a novel. Consider this post the sequel. Longer, and this time public. Let’s see how close I got.