Decisions
15+ recent decisions
Sensitive Decision
Rule the Toyota kernel patch a feature not a bug; no automatic queue jump, escalate through normal priority
Jul 10, 2026 · operational · medium78% confidence
Nathan flagged a Toyota/Yoshi request (relayed via Art/sales) framed as a bug fix. Peter ruled it is a feature, not a bug, so it does not automatically jump the engineering queue on the bug argument. Support may still be offered, but the bug framing is off the table. If the business wants it prioritized it must go through normal escalation and trade-off (Peter + Bjorn), not a backdoor via mislabeling severity. Reinforced later the same day in the Ryan 1:1 (Peter rebuked Art for taking the bug-vs-feature fight to engineering).
People: Nathan Blackham, Art Tyde, Bjorn Hovland
Willing to pull C3 into engineering, gated on Product confirming it is a priority
Jul 9, 2026 · operational · medium61% confidence
In his 1:1 with Art Tyde, Peter said he is willing to pull C3 into his engineering org, conditional on Product (Bjorn) actually confirming it is a priority. C3 ownership is currently ambiguous (Peter was told Greg owns it, which he called a terrible answer, and nobody under Peter owns it), it is degraded (reported ~50 percent down, Fathom-approximate), and it is blocking a Huawei evaluation. Peter made a note to figure out who is responsible for keeping it up and how to fix that.
People: Peter Nelson, Bjorn Hovland, Greg Kurtzer, Arthur Tyde
Pass on Patrick Culp for now (no black mark), re-engage in 3-6 months
Jul 9, 2026 · people · low70% confidence
In the Round Table hiring debrief for candidates Ben Howard and Patrick Culp, Peter decided to pass on Patrick Culp for now - explicitly not a hard rejection - with intent to re-engage him in three to six months. Stated reason: he wants breadth of past experience coming into Nathan org right now. Peter committed to co-drafting the decline and re-engage message with Bree Clasen.
People: Peter Nelson, Patrick Culp, Brianne Clasen, Nathan Blackham
Support Nathan CVE-first prioritization over the Google minimal-kernel delivery; own the customer comms
Jul 9, 2026 · strategy · medium80% confidence
Nathan flagged that in-flight critical local-privilege-escalation CVEs collided with the committed 6.18 minimal-kernel delivery to Google and called for CVE remediation to come first. Peter backed that call rather than making it: agreed to a bounded slip (no more than a week, not three), was comfortable asking the team to work a weekend to verify already-built patches, and took personal ownership of communicating the slip to Google - framed as value-add (surface only the CVEs Google benefits from), not an apology. Peter wrote and sent the explanatory email to Tissa and the Google team the same day.
People: Peter Nelson, Nathan Blackham, Justin Haynes, Bjorn Hovland, Kelly Hall
Restructure the Tuesday staff meeting to org-by-org TPS ownership and un-fork the TPS report to one shared source
Jul 7, 2026 · operational · medium69% confidence
Peter is firmly changing how he runs his Tuesday staff meeting: instead of Peter walking the team through the TPS report, each org owner presents their own section and owns that part of the meeting. He also committed to un-fork his drifted TPS report back to a single shared report, visible to everyone three days ahead.
People: Peter Nelson, Max Spevack
Reinforce that an automated Linux CI/CD pipeline is one of the top-3 H2 company objectives
Jul 7, 2026 · strategy · medium72% confidence
Peter had already set an automated Linux CI/CD pipeline as one of CIQ three top company objectives for H2 (base decision not previously captured). In the Max 1:1 and Engineering Weekly he reinforced to people that it is there and that it is critical to Linux delivery - a company objective, not just a Nathan-team objective. Logged as reinforcement.
People: Peter Nelson, Max Spevack, Nathan Blackham, Justin Haynes
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Everfox desktop-OS: require explicitly scoped and funded eng-investment before supporting the deal
Jun 30, 2026 · strategy · medium66% confidence
On the Everfox desktop-OS deal, Peter framed it as a fundamentally different business (be like Ubuntu while also being like RedHat, not add desktop support to Rocky) and insisted the unknowns around hardware enablement / driver support and a dedicated lab be made explicit. His engineering-side conditions: the MSA must fix the hardware scope with out-of-scope hardware priced separately, and CIQ should proceed only with an explicit commitment to fund the engineering regardless of revenue. He tasked Max to assess technical feasibility with Nathan before committing. Relates to the prior logged Everfox decision d1ea8ed9; this is the engineering-stewardship condition layer.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Nathan Blackham, Ramesh Srinivasan, Max Spevack, Suzanne Spencer-Purcell