U.S. Army
Twelve years in uniform, on Active Duty and in the National Guard. The path started at Combat Medic, moved through a commission as an officer, and reached Captain. Command is where the real cost of ownership became clear, and the S6 role became my closest early parallel to product work.
- Service
- U.S. Army, Active Duty & National Guard
- Years
- Twelve
- Final rank
- Captain
- Soldiers
- 6,000+ directly and indirectly led, trained, and supported over 8 years
- Closest product parallel
- S6: Patriot system software, with Raytheon
- Roles held
- Combat Medic, Platoon Leader, Executive Officer, Company Commander, and Battalion Staff Officer (S6)
From medic to command
The path started at the ground level as a Combat Medic, moved through a commission as an officer, and progressed through the leadership ranks: Platoon Leader, Executive Officer, Company Commander. Then came battalion staff as a Battalion Staff Officer (the S6, accountable for the unit's communications and IT). That was the step from running a company to helping run a battalion, and owning the systems everyone else depended on but nobody thought about until they failed.
What command taught me about ownership
Command is where the real cost of ownership becomes clear. You decide with incomplete information. You answer for outcomes you don't personally execute. And you develop the people around you or the mission fails. There's no version of the job where you own the result but not the team, or the team but not the result. You own both, fully, at once.
The parallels to product ownership are direct. The surface is different (a roadmap instead of a mission, engineers instead of a platoon), but the underlying capabilities transfer: turn ambiguity into a plan, own the outcome end-to-end, and keep the people accountable to it moving in the same direction.
The S6: my closest early parallel to product
The S6 role was the closest early parallel to product ownership I'd encounter. As the HOIC, the work meant close partnership with Raytheon on the software that runs the Patriot system, owning the requirements from the people who actually had to use it.
There were two user groups, and effectively two products under one system. One was the interface soldiers used to operate the equipment. It had to be usable under pressure, by people who couldn't stop to read a manual. The other was the data representation and analysis the officers relied on: the air-battlefield picture the radars built, turned into something a commander could read and act on. That output fed real-time, in-battle decisions all the way up to the Lieutenant Colonel making the call.
It also taught the other half of the job: coordination. Air Defense Artillery only works as a joint effort; the Army and the Air Force have to operate as one, and aligning a vendor, the operators, and the commanders around a picture everyone could trust carried the same capabilities product ownership requires: two distinct user types, an external partner, a hard requirement that it work when it counts, and outputs people had to bet on.
What carried forward
The military is where the operating instinct was formed. The governance patterns I use today (role boundaries, clear authority, decisions made and owned) have roots in what command demanded first.