[Zoethink]

A few years ago, I pitched an internal developer tool that would've saved hours of manual QA work. I had data, a working prototype, and even initial support from a couple of engineers.

It went nowhere. Why? I didn’t do any pre-alignment. I presented it cold in a leadership meeting and watched people nod politely… then forget about it the next day.

Reading about Nemawashi and Engineered Serendipity now makes it painfully obvious what I missed: those informal 1:1s, quiet pre-chats, and planting the seed before the meeting.