Abhilash Menon
Twenty years of modernizing legacy platforms taught me what it takes to change both the technology and the people who use it. Working with AI, and building safeguards around it, has made that change faster while keeping the risk under control.
Here you can learn from the mistakes I made, and from the insights that sat in plain sight while many technology leaders looked past them.
Selected work
All projects →Retiring Legacy Applications
A playbook for retiring old applications safely, and the project that proved it.
High-Performance Team Transformation
A diagnostic-led system for building high-performing teams and turning struggling ones into resilient, self-sufficient units. Five phases, two underlying forces, one non-negotiable.
Notion-to-Website Pipeline
I write in Notion and say "sync my site". Claude Code does the rest, and asks me before anything goes live.
Building with AI
All 11 builds →- World Through My Lens newsletterLive
- Cloud spend-reporting warehouseIn build
- Notion-to-Website Publishing PipelineLive
- A personal AI working environmentLive
- An LLM-powered knowledge baseLive
- Versioned memory & skills backupLive
Latest writing
All 14 posts →One Night Outside: Do What Is Needed, Not What Was Done Before
In February 2023 my BMO team spent a night outside for 360°kids. One sentence from that night still shapes how I lead.
The Freeze: Finding My Voice in High-Stakes Rooms
In some rooms I go blank on things I know cold. It is not a character flaw. It is wiring, and there are two places to work on it.
When "Everyone Knows" Becomes Your Biggest Program Risk
Large programs rarely fail because someone forgot a task. They fail because everyone is busy doing the right things — while quietly operating on different assumptions.
World Through My Lens
One short letter, every Sunday.
The few stories that mattered, what I built, and what I read, with my own take on each.