More About Me - Karl Ring | AI Product Strategy & Facilitation

i · Where it starts

Nobody in my family treated learning as something you finished.

My dad read encyclopedias instead of going to college. My mom went back to school when I was in first grade and brought me to lectures when childcare fell through. My grandmother handed me art supplies before anyone judged whether I was good at it.

I had three older brothers running live prototypes of how to solve life's challenges before I had to. All of it taught me to observe first and stay curious - the same way I open an engagement: no standing to protect, nothing I already know.

Karl Ring as a young boy wearing Superman Underoos

ii · What improv actually trains

Every room has an unsaid thing. It's almost never a secret, everyone just hates to go first.

Plenty of people can hear what isn't being said. Fewer will say it when it actually costs them something. Most who try say it badly, as an accusation, and the room closes for good - what's left is misalignment at best, siloed teams at worst.

Yes, and… is a discipline before it's an attitude. You take what you were handed and put it to work together rather than arguing with it. That isn't a nicety. It's the technique I trust for putting a new idea into a room without making anyone in it wrong.

Karl Ring performing with Morristown Improv

iii · Where it went next

It evolved further watching my wife work with children by following them.

In Michelle's approach you don't hand a kid a picture to copy. You give them a prompt toward a goal, then watch what they're already doing and follow their process until it gets somewhere. That somewhere can be magic.

I'd been running at this with teams for years before I noticed, while still believing a leader was supposed to arrive with the answer already.

Karl Ring building a cardboard robot with his nephew Noah

iv · Why the discipline matters

Every late launch I watched with enterprise teams traced back to a system nobody agreed on up front.

The retro is where it always shows, one way or another. Either it produces concrete, incremental change, or it becomes a ceremony for saying what wasn't said earlier - performed, not practiced. Left that way, the friction doesn't go away; it just sits there untreated, and trust and delivery erode with it.

Agile product delivery systems and ways of working are the third training, improvisational philosophy fused with core product and project-management discipline, and what it actually teaches has nothing to do with ceremony: alignment gets built before the sprint starts, not recovered during it. Accountability, exit criteria and results only work when everyone agreed to them while there was still time to disagree.

v · The longer career version

Fifteen years at the seam where technology meets the things people rely on to get through a day.

Phone service, billing, getting their jobs done - the stuff nobody notices until it breaks. I shipped AT&T's first ML/AI-powered revenue product, and an AI shopping flow at Verizon that people adopted without being paid to.

Before any of that I produced television for E!, A&E, TV Land and Animal Planet, and experiential marketing for American Express, Shell and iRobot. Across all of it, teaching improvisation and performing improv is what taught me to find the why and the so-what behind the work together, not just delivering a dictated outcome.

25 years on an improv stage

Karl Ring coaching a scene at a Morristown Improv jam, Morristown NJ

Still practicing how to get a room to hear each other and build something magical from it.

Morristown Improv, Morristown NJ

vi · Where I keep writing

Most of what's above started as a question I was working out loud before it became a paragraph here. I keep asking those questions on Substack - product, AI and alignment, same instinct, no client on the other end of it.

Read the Substack →