Kelly Wall
Jan 12, 2026 - Oct 30, 2026
8
Decisions
0
Active Todos
11
Patterns
Categories
Decisions (8)
ISMS council - accept Risk 33 (vendor breach) and accept a binding legal-review obligation for externally shared incident reports
At the 10/29 ISMS governance council Peter accepted Risk 33 (third-party SaaS vendor breach, high impact, unlikely, score 10) and, after questioning whether to tie CIQ hands, accepted the IR plan change obligating legal review before any incident material is shared with a customer or external party.
2027 engineering budget - current reqs plus only two unallocated heads, one org-wide gathering every six months, cloud spend modeled as growth-tied
In the 10/23 2027 budget walkthrough with Chris Baek and Kelly Wall, Peter set the assumptions: open reqs plus the five or six planned engineering, hardware and AI hires, then only two unallocated TBD heads (around April and August/September); an additional IT head comes out of that buffer only if Steve wins the case with Peter, which he has not yet. Ongoing market adjustments for underpaid engineers are independent of any Series B true-up; model engineering cost up about 10 percent. Travel allows one gathering of Peter whole org every six months, not separate six-month gatherings per sub-org - CIQ chose to be remote. Cloud modeled at about 75K per month H1 and 85K H2, since it is customer traffic on Portal and Depot and only rises with revenue. Computer spend 150K; AI budget raised.
Take finance out of the hardware pre-approval chain - ramp cards to direct reports, finance documents after the fact
In the weekly 1:1 with Steve Wallace, Peter said he had picked a fight with finance over the last couple of weeks because people were being hounded over small hardware purchases such as a network switch needed to stand up a Spark. Resolution: finance will issue a ramp card to everyone reporting directly to Peter, good for five thousand dollars a month. Peter approval is still required and the asset-tracking obligation to Moody stays. Finance is removed from prior approval and moved into the documentation chain after the purchase. Large purchases such as one hundred thousand dollars still go through the regular process. Separately, when Erin Fong asked Chris Baek to formalize a request and Peter approval by email to accounting, Peter told Baek that is why she cannot be in the approval chain for things that need to move FAST, and that she can be in the documentation chain after things happen.
Refuse to act on the AI spend number until it is decomposed - one-time hardware out, recurring API in - then treat the remainder as usage discipline rather than a spend cap
Steve Wallace raised rising AI costs at the end of the Aug 18 Engineering Weekly Sync. Peter did not accept the number as presented. He said the AI costs finance is counting include one-time purchases like the giant chassis just bought from NVIDIA for the 200s, and: I do not want to get hung up on one-time costs. I care way more about the recurring cloud costs and making sure people are being smart there. He set a meeting with finance for Thursday in LA to decompose it, and named what the response will be once the number is clean: model-tier discipline (teaching people not to do every single thing with Fable and Opus - Sonnet is still there for a reason and still really good at some things), possibly monthly per-person budgets, and a quality bar on AI-assisted work. Nathan raised that copy-pasting a prompt in and the answer out adds no value; Peter closed it with: we should be holding each other accountable and not accepting work at that bar.
Rippling Asset Mgmt — time over cost; pay full $18k for end-of-June over $15k for December
The Rippling Asset Management integration project was de-scoped to ~$15k from ~$18k. Peter decided the full-scope original at $18k is acceptable IF Rippling can deliver by end of June. Steve will get the timeline from Kelly Wall to inform the final decision. Explicit framing: time over cost. The principle is conditional — if Rippling slips on the end-of-June timeline, the math changes and $15k-for-December may be the right call.
Moody Citibank card hard cutoff 6/15 — force-action via past-tense framing after 9 months of soft asks
After Kelly Wall described 9 months of soft asks to Steve Moody to switch from the personal-history Citibank card to the Ramp card (forcing manual finance journal entries every month), Peter directed Kelly to send Moody a notice that the card has been disabled and will stop working on June 15. CC Steve Wallace. Phrase it past-tense (has been disabled) plus future-fact (stops working 6/15) — not request language. Peter explicitly affirmed his prior gate (Kelly checks with him before shut-offs) while greenlighting this one because Kelly is giving a month notice — the notice IS the legitimacy gate.
ICP Consolidation - RLCH and RLCAI into Fuzzball
Consolidated RLCH (Rocky Linux Confidential Hardened) and RLCAI ICPs with Fuzzball ICPs to simplify GTM. RLCH targets regulated industries, government, power distribution. RLCAI targets AI-inferencing and compute-heavy industries. Rocky Pro kept separate for mid-market RHEL/SUSE/Oracle replacement motion.
H1 Planning Framework - 3-Lane Model
Introduced a new 3-lane planning model to address GTM and Engineering misalignment. Top Lane (GTM): marketing campaigns, messaging. Middle Lane (Value Drivers): the why - market state change, ICP, business significance. Bottom Lane (Engineering): deliverables driven by Value Drivers.
Related Patterns (11)
Lead by Example with New Tools
When championing new tools or processes, personally use them and share results rather than just advocating. Learning by doing and demonstrating value through example is more effective than mandates.
Protect Engineering Focus Through Process
When faced with requests that would disrupt engineering focus (from sales, governance, product, or other stakeholders), establish processes that protect engineering ability to innovate while still satisfying legitimate concerns. Prefer systematic solutions over ad-hoc responses.
Reclassify to Route - Decide Who Owns It, Then Give a Criterion Not a Verdict
When a question arrives at Peter framed in one domain, he often does not answer it in that framing. He reclassifies it into the domain that actually governs the outcome, which relocates ownership to whoever owns that lane, and then hands down a decision criterion rather than a verdict. The reclassification IS the decision - it determines who decides. He does this rather than adjudicating on the merits himself, even when he was explicitly cc-ed and even when a direct report challenges him on the substance.
Purpose Is the Decision Procedure
When someone asks how a process, board, tool or artifact should handle their specific case, Peter refuses to answer on the askers terms. He re-derives the answer from what the artifact is for, states that purpose as the only decision procedure, and lets the answer fall out. Anything found to be serving a second purpose is deleted rather than debated. Tools and views are explicitly subordinate to definitions. He will accept that the askers real problem is simply not solved by this artifact rather than widen the artifact to cover it.
Route Non-Differentiating FTE Classes to Partners
When CIQ would otherwise need to staff a function whose work does not differentiate the company — compliance bureaucracy, audit/cert paperwork, ongoing regulatory attestation, etc. — Peter routes the load to a partner who already owns adjacent capability rather than adding the FTE class internally. Org-shape decision dressed as a partnership decision.
Demonstrate the Standard, Then Collect It
When a new leadership expectation has to land across multiple orgs, Peter does not write a spec. He runs a live exemplar in public with the strongest performer first, says openly that the ordering was deliberate, keeps the form of the deliverable open so the ask stays about the thinking rather than the artifact, lets the delta be self-evident to the people who will have to close it, and then collects the same from everyone else on a named rotation. He prefers showing imperfect work now over polished work later.
Decide on the Precedent, Not the Case
When a request arrives framed as a one-off, Peter does not evaluate the one-off. He evaluates the rule that granting it would write, and answers that instead. Peter generalized this himself on 2026-08-11: it is always about understanding precedent - whether it is a comp change or anything that structurally affects the company. It is therefore NOT a compensation pattern; the domain of the presenting request is incidental. The tell that this pattern is live is that the stated reason for the answer refers to future cases rather than to the merits of the present one.
Metrics Must Follow Strategy
When shifting team priorities or strategic direction, the communication alone will not drive behavior change. Engineers may acknowledge the new direction but continue existing behavior patterns without clear, explicit metrics holding them accountable.
Switch Instrument, Not Intensity
Applies when a message, rule or ask has already failed through the channel Peter is currently using - repeated advocacy that has not landed, coaching that produced defensiveness rather than improvement, exhortation that did not change behaviour, or a rule that keeps losing case by case. His response is never to restate the same thing more forcefully. He changes the instrument and usually names the switch out loud. Mined from 7 independent observations between 2026-01-06 and 2026-08-21.
Time Over Cost
Peter treats elapsed time as the scarce quantity and money as the abundant one, and will spend cash to buy schedule, clarity or optionality. Notable because he named it himself as a transferable principle on 2026-05-21 and coached the lens explicitly to a direct report, which is rare - most of his patterns are inferred rather than stated. It generalises past procurement: he will pay to convert an ambiguous dispute into a binary one, remove cost as a variable entirely when a priority has executive visibility, and reason about a commitment in terms of lead time rather than budget. Mined from 5 independent observations between 2026-02-01 and 2026-09-11.
Install the Criterion Before the Argument
Applies to a contested question that has not been argued yet - a meeting about to start, a test about to run, an escalation just received, a proposal about to be written. Peter moves first to fix the criterion, the boundary or the posture, before anyone argues the substance. The consistent effect, named explicitly in the 2026-07-29 observation, is that the other party cannot win by being more persuasive on the merits, because the merits are no longer the axis. Distinct from Reclassify to Route in mechanism: that pattern reassigns who owns a question, this one controls WHEN the criterion lands relative to the debate. The two frequently co-occur. Mined from 7 independent observations between 2026-01-20 and 2026-08-31.