Shipping OG from 0-to-1
In 2026 I had the chance to help lead the launch of OG — a new prediction market platform spun out of Crypto.com as a standalone product. Concept to live in under two months, with 200+ people across engineering, product, compliance, legal, risk, ops, and external partners — market makers, the works. CFTC oversight the entire way.
My role was to help drive delivery end-to-end — shaping the product alongside eng and design, holding the trade-off conversations, and trying to keep 200 people moving against the same version of the plan. I'm still learning from it, but a few things stood out:
1. Decide what "done" means before the first sprint
In regulated work, "feature complete" and "shippable" aren't the same. We tried to split scope into three buckets early: launch-critical, fast-follow, and maybe-never. Everything got an owner, and we tried not to move things between buckets without a written reason. When the timeline got tight — and it did — that doc was what kept scope trade-offs from turning into politics.
2. The critical path is usually people, not code
Engineering velocity rarely seemed to be the bottleneck. Legal review windows, compliance sign-off, market-maker onboarding, vendor integrations — those were. I started mapping the critical path less by ticket and more by decision: who needs to say yes, by when, and what do they need to see to say it. That reframing helped more than I expected.
3. Write things down
The trade-off calls were easier when we got everyone to the same version of the answer and wrote it down. If a decision didn't get captured, it tended to get re-litigated three weeks later with less context and more tired people. So we tried to keep a short summary for each: what we decided, what we deferred, why. Boring, but it helped.
A lot of this is stuff I'm still figuring out. But the pattern I keep coming back to is that what compounds is the operating system underneath — clear scope, decision velocity, a written record. When that works, a big effort can move a little more like a small one.