Hi friends,

Behzod here! You haven’t heard from me in a while. Issue 004 was sent in September 2022, so you may not even remember that you subscribed for this newsletter. If that’s the case and you’re not interested anymore, my feelings won’t be hurt if you unsubscribe (time and attention are two of the most important things to manage well!).

If you are still interested though, there is so much to talk about. ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, so my last email was essentially from the dark ages.

The arc of the last 3.5 years

Since the last time you heard from me here, I continued my independent consulting-slash-advising-slash-me-as-a-service work through March 2025, at which point I joined Vercel as the Chief of Staff for Product & Engineering.

I’ve written a little about this in my annual reviews (2023 and 2024ish), but one of the motivations for this move was that two of the larger projects I did in 2024 went well, but made me wonder if they would have gone better if I had been in-house at a company (the short answer is yes and no). Both of them suffered from some of the traditional trappings of consulting work (unknown unknowns, lack of context, organization politics for an outsider, etc) and it made me curious what life was like on the other side.

Thankfully, I was having lunch with my friend at Vercel and said I was looking for “good people and chaos to organize” and he (rightly) claimed that Vercel had plenty of both.

I joined with the charter of “building the operating system for our Engineering, Product, and Design organization,” which really meant my job was to fix things, or, as I like to say, I was hired to care.

Chief of Staff roles are quite varied, based on the executive (team) you’re supporting, the shape of the organization, and whatever is on fire that week day hour. I also had the joy of building and leading ShipOps, which was our take on Product Ops & TPM.

I’ve written a little bit about my time at Vercel publicly (30 days in and 11 months in) and a ton privately — almost every day for the first 9ish months (and many days after), I shared reflections, observations, and questions in a channel I called “Behzod Notes.” The goal of the channel was a public journal of sorts, meant to both keep track of what I was noticing and invite feedback from people who had more context, alternative takes, or wanted to add their own perspective.

Over time, this (perhaps unsurprisingly) evolved into a reflection on how Vercel works and works together, a topic that seems to be the only through line in my career from graduate school to today. (Hold this thought please.)

While I’m grateful for the incredible people I worked with and learned from at Vercel, I found myself pulled in other directions and stepped back a few weeks ago.

Once a researcher, always a researcher

It will not be a surprise to anyone close to me (or probably many of you who know me professionally) that one of the things I enjoyed the most at Vercel was doing research.

Though I was rarely customer-facing, I was fascinated by the way Vercel evolved into the company that it is today. As a part of my ramp up, I spent the first 3ish months talking to over a dozen people each week, and these conversations were often the fuel for #behzod-notes posts.

Vercel squarely lives in the future. The company operates with a speed that I’ve never experienced before, and the things that AI has changed and enabled over the last few months meant that so many of my ideas about how companies should work were regularly being challenged (do we need roadmaps? what is a “team” actually?).

Over time, I realized that I was less curious about understanding how one company was changing in this period of turmoil and far more interested in how companies writ large are changing, especially those that aren’t primarily for developers, by developers.

This was a big motivation to step away from Vercel. I wanted to dance with questions I wouldn’t be able to answer within those walls, or at least couldn’t dedicate sufficient time to without failing to do my job.

In a lot of ways, stepping away from Vercel felt easy. It wasn’t easy to leave great people, but it was easy to lean into my curiosity, especially since one of the things that feels like it has not changed is the importance of understanding what problems are worth solving. Things that are squarely in the domain of UX/user/product/whatever-modifier-we-want-to-use research (I’m going to use “research” from here on out).

Picking up where I left off

We’re two weeks out from Yet Another Studio’s 6th birthday, which is a wild and humbling sentence to write. One of the things I’m most proud of and grateful for professionally is the ability to work with people I respect on problems I find meaningful, and YAS has been the primary vehicle for that in this chapter of my life.

While I’m not sure where this part of the journey will take me, I do know a few things:

1. I’m going to continue writing about how companies work and work together. As a nod to my channel at Vercel, I’ve spun up Behzod Notes on Substack and will be sharing a few things in the coming weeks. (I’m not sure Substack will be the long-term home… but if any of you have feedback, especially about Ghost, I’d love to hear it).

2. I’m starting a podcast-shaped project with a close friend about how AI specifically is changing work, starting with research for season one. The goal here is less “share tips for Claude Code” and more “understand how the underlying behaviors and dynamics of work are changing in 2026.” We’re curious about things like “Do I expect more from my colleagues because they have AI?” Stay tuned!

3. I’d love to hear from you, especially if you want to work together OR want to provide feedback on drafts of essays (we all know that Google Docs is where the club meets).

Before I close, I do want to shamelessly promote a few things I’m proud of that you may find interesting:

• I joined Kate Towsey on her Scaling and Systemizing Research podcast last June. Kate has had a tremendous impact on how I think about and do my work, and it’s always a delight to riff with her.

• I gave a talk at Great Research last June (starts at 2:30:00) about the most important question we should be asking in our jobs — “why are you here?”

• Be Romantic — an essay on why the most important work comes from people who care about things nobody asked them to care about.

Okay, I’m actually done.

Thank you for reading this far and being on this journey with me. If I can be helpful in any way, please get in touch.

Behzod