Not theorizing from a distance.
Built from direct transformation work.

Eugene is an engineering leader with 25+ years building, transforming, and shipping software product organizations. From 2019 to 2026 he was Head of Engineering for PACE — UST Global's multi-module Internal Developer Platform offering — where he owned product development end to end across an eight-module portfolio and built and refined the operating model that became Discover Innovate Deliver. His organization ran engineering, design, technical writing, and scrum mastery across eight stream-aligned product teams, an AI/ML enablement team, and platform infrastructure — up to 70 people in all. Today he focuses on the book and on advisory work helping product organizations adopt the model.

His work is anchored by a single conviction: most product organizations fail not for lack of talent or effort, but for lack of a coherent operating model that connects what customers actually need to what gets built and shipped. Eugene has spent over two decades replacing output-driven cultures with evidence-first practice — taking a main product line from quarterly releases to a bi-weekly cadence sustained since 2020, retiring centralized QA functions in favor of built-in quality, introducing trunk-based discipline at scale, and proving the operating principles through measurable outcomes — including a Toyota-Kata-style transitional experiment that drove an ~80% reduction in monthly defect counts across his teams, from roughly 120 to 24.

In 2024, UST Global published Eugene's Delivery Improvement Framework (DIF) — the consolidation of the operating principles he had been refining inside the company. The New Stack covered the framework shortly after publication. Discover Innovate Deliver, written jointly with Samuel Wachtel, extends DIF into the full operating model and adds the practitioner-narrative depth that DIF couldn't carry alone.

Intellectual Foundations

Eugene's thinking integrates Jobs-to-be-Done (Strategyn — Tony Ulwick), Continuous Delivery (Humble & Farley), Team Topologies (Skelton & Pais), Toyota Kata (Mike Rother), and the DevOps performance research consolidated in Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, Kim). He has actively brought these disciplines into his organization through layered training programs — direct workshops by Strategyn for team members, and by Continuous Delivery Ltd. (David Farley's organization) for engineering leads.

Sam has spent close to thirty years shipping software into places where mistakes are expensive: clinical trial operations, population-scale behavioral health intervention, claims analytics, and now applied AI at NewAmsterdam Pharma, where he is Executive Director of Applied AI Solutions, building the platforms that let people and AI agents alike pull trusted answers out of clinical data. He has been a developer, a product manager, and an engineering leader, often all three at the same time. Underneath all of it, one conviction: delivery isn't the step after the real work. Delivery is where an organization finally starts to learn. In D.I.D., Sam owns the story itself: the book's transformation from framework into novel.

Before NewAmsterdam: eleven years at the Otsuka digital-health companies, where he built a patient-population management platform for a behavioral health payer, data and analytics systems, a claims analytics platform, patient-support tools for insights and next-best actions, and finally arriving at AI in the final stretch, the way everyone did, except he had the platforms and strategies ready for it. Along the way he owned UX, engineering design, analytics, and business analysis, leading teams of ten-plus across development, testing, and everything in between. Before that, thirteen years as Executive Director of Business Technology at Comprehensive Clinical Development, where one system he built ran in production for nineteen years. It was decommissioned in 2025, by which point it was old enough to choose an undergrad major.

He studied psychology and classical piano performance at Sarah Lawrence College, which is either strange preparation for a software career or exactly the right one. The music stuck. Sam still writes songs, lyrics, occasional short stories, and — well — now a book. He also plays and sings in Dusty Wings, the band he shares with Eugene. Yes, the co-authors are also bandmates. The book has better version control.