People ask why a technology executive signs his emails "do everything with love." They expect a tech leader to talk about uptime, scale, and systems. Love sounds soft. It is not. In my work it means two specific things: excellence and care. It means building with the same attention you would give to something made for a person you respect. And it means never forgetting that on the other side of every system is a human being who is tired, busy, or under pressure, and who simply needs the thing to work.
That is not sentiment. It is the most practical operating principle I know.
What love actually means in technology
Strip the warmth out of the word for a moment and look at what is left. Care is the refusal to ship something you would be embarrassed to hand to a person you admire. Excellence is the decision to get it right before anyone is watching. Put them together and you get a standard, not a feeling.
Excellence is not a feeling. It is a decision you make before the work begins.
You decide who the work is for. You decide that their time matters. You decide that "technically functional" is not the same as "actually usable." Everything after that is execution.
The most expensive sentence in technology
There is a sentence that has done more quiet damage to good products than any bug ever has. "People don't know what they want."
It gets attributed to Steve Jobs, and engineers reach for it constantly. I have watched it happen for twenty-five years. A team hears that line and treats it as permission. Permission to skip the messy conversations with the people who will actually use the thing. Permission to retreat into a room, build in silos, and emerge months later with something elegant, sophisticated, and impossible to use.
Here is the part they miss. Jobs did not ignore users. He understood them so deeply that he could anticipate what they could not yet articulate. That is the opposite of building in the dark. The misreading turns a lesson about deep empathy into an excuse for isolation. And the bill comes due every time, in abandoned software, in workarounds, in people who quietly stop trusting the tools you gave them.
The real issue is not that people don't know what they want. It is that builders too often don't bother to find out.
Build with people, not for them
So I run my teams on a simple rule. We build with people, not for them. My engineers meet the users early and often. Not once, at the end, in a demo. Early, when the design can still change, and often, so the design keeps changing as we learn.
I learned the value of this far from a server room. Years ago, in hospitality, I watched what technology felt like at the worst possible moment for a guest. Picture someone arriving at an unfamiliar property near midnight, exhausted from travel, standing at a door that will not open. In that moment, no one cares how sophisticated the smart lock is. They care whether it lets them in. They remember the warm light that greeted them when it finally did, set to a temperature that felt like welcome rather than fluorescence. The technology that earns trust is the technology designed for the human at their most stressed, not the human in a comfortable conference room approving a roadmap.
That lesson never left me. The best feature I have ever seen added to a product did not come from an architect. It came from the person who used the system all day and showed us, without a single slide, what was making their job harder. We never would have found it from across the building. We found it because we were standing next to them.
This is what love looks like in practice. It is unglamorous. It is sitting with the people your work is supposed to serve and letting what you learn change what you build.
Love is a discipline, not a feeling
None of this is soft. It is the hardest discipline in the work, because it requires humility. You have to admit you do not understand someone's job better than they do. You have to count the clicks, sit through the friction, and design for the worst day instead of the demo. You have to choose, again and again, the harder path of building something people can actually live with.
Anyone can care about a user in a meeting. Loving the work means proving it in the build, when no one is applauding and the easy choice is to ship and move on.
Why this matters more in the age of AI
We are now handing more and more decisions to systems that move faster than we do. The temptation to build in silos has never been stronger, because the technology is dazzling enough to convince its makers that brilliance is the same as usefulness. It is not.
The organizations that will earn trust in this era are the ones that treat AI as a human decision, not just a technical one. They will ask who this serves, who it could harm, and whether the people on the receiving end were ever in the room. The systems that matter most, the ones people depend on when the stakes are high, do not get to be merely impressive. They have to be trustworthy, and trustworthy is something you build with people, not for them.
That is the whole philosophy. Excellence, because people deserve your best work. Care, because they are people. Do everything with love is not the soft part of how I lead. It is the standard everything else has to clear.