Hi — I'm Rob.

A few years ago I was leading software engineering at a B2B company. We built our own product but bought a lot of our tooling from suppliers — so we lived on both sides of the same problem. We saw how thin that tooling could be. And we felt the other half too: being the customer who can't tell what's going on, waiting on a supplier who's gone quiet at the worst possible moment.

One weekend it landed on us properly. An international customer was working to a Monday deadline, and our site went down for three hours. We didn't catch it — the alert never fired. I'll keep the specifics light; it's not entirely my story to tell. But here's how we found out: the customer phoned our CEO. And then it got worse in a quiet, ordinary way — the people who noticed first weren't sure who to call, and when they did reach for someone, that person wasn't available. Three hours of a customer in the dark. Not because nobody cared, but because there was no shared picture of what was happening or who owned it.

Not long after, we ran a project to fix the tooling side. We looked at the obvious tools, sat through the sales calls — and none met what were honestly pretty simple requirements. The realistic option was to buy several products and wire them together ourselves. All we wanted was something we could stand up quickly, that joined things up where it made sense, and gave the whole business one place to see the state of play: is the queue busy? Does someone need to jump in? The engineers wanted to help — they just had no view of what the customer was experiencing. Especially now, when half the team isn't in an office and there's no dashboard on the wall to glance at.

Since then I've worked with all sorts of small B2B companies, and the same picture keeps showing up. Different products, different stacks, same gap: support in one tool, incidents in another, a status page nobody updated, a monitor alerting into a channel no customer could see. The information always existed — it just never crossed between the surfaces where it mattered, and the whole team was rarely invited in, only whoever happened to be "on the seat."

So I'm building the thing I kept wishing we'd had. One workspace where support, incidents, monitoring, and the customer-facing portal share the same picture — and where the whole team is invited by default, because that's the only way a small team stays upfront when something breaks.

I'm not live yet. I'm shaping it with a small group of early users first — I'd rather build it with the people who'll actually use it than announce it finished and quietly patch it later. So if this is your problem too, I'd love to have you in early.

I'll be honest — I was slow to come round to AI. Partly fear: I'm a developer, and the early pitch sounded a lot like "this replaces you." Partly that the promises seemed too good to be true. But it's come a long way, and there's no pretending otherwise — it genuinely automates work that wasn't automatable before. There's even an upside I didn't expect: it's quietly pushing businesses to write down how things are actually meant to work, because now something other than a human has to follow it. That discipline was always worth having. AI just removed the excuse for skipping it.

So I'm not anti-AI — I use it every day. What I'm against is AI-spam pointed at your customers: the wave of tools that will happily auto-generate an incident update, fire off a support reply in a human-sounding name, or push a status notification no person ever read first.

That's why StayUpfront's AI — Sue — is conservative by design. She triages incoming tickets so the urgent one rises to the top, drafts incident updates for a human to edit before they go out, and summarises long threads so you can catch up fast. And she stays inside guardrails I set deliberately: there's a kill switch, and she doesn't override anything you've done by hand. When she replies to a customer directly, she's labelled as Sue. The point is simple: AI should make the operator's job easier without making the company any less upfront with the people it serves.

StayUpfront isn't the only thing I build. During the week I do engineering-leadership work with small B2B companies — that's at robgough.net. I write there too, though honestly not all that often. More reliably, I spend a lot of my time talking with other people in this industry about how they actually run support and keep their customers in the loop.

I ship side projects, too. The main two are Dictator, a dictation app, and Weighted Down, a simple food diary, weight tracker and medication log.

I try to build in public. It's fairly new for me and I don't always manage it — but a tool for staying upfront with customers ought to be built by someone willing to be upfront about the building.