I wrote down my three stories
Steve Huynh wrote a piece on A Life Engineered called 3 Stories Every Professional Should Have Ready. Huynhis an ex-Amazon pincipal engineer turned content creator. His stuff is a strange guilty pleasure for me. Some people have Love is Blind. I have A Life Engineered.
The piece claimed, that three stories cover most professional rooms you'll ever walk into.
- Your introduction. "Tell me about yourself."
- Three signature accomplishments at different scopes. Career. Past year. Most recent.
- Your growth arc. Where you were. Where you are. Where you're heading.
You write them once and practice them out loud. And then in interviews, skip-levels, conferences, and meetings with new people, you aren't rebuilding the answer from scratch.
I took his post, pasted it into Claude and asked it to interview and coach me to help me come up with my three stories.
Who are you?
Before the three stories, Huynh's framework has a prerequisite. A thesis about who you are. "Who you are" stays constant across every room. Only the supporting details change.
Mine came out like this:
I'm a senior engineer at Stripe. Before becoming an engineer I had a completely different career. I worked for 10 years in public education. I made a career change to software engineering in 2016 after my twins were born. I care a lot about what and how I build, which means lately I've been obsessed with AI.
Introduction
Huynh recommends taking the base idea and adding riffs for different contexts.
Stripe Internal
I raised my hand to work on the agentic commerce team in 2025. Before that I led the onboarding flow for Stripe Organizations and started AI Vibes, the internal AI newsletter.
Writing
Most of my writing is about building with AI. I curate an internal AI newsletter at Stripe that reaches about a tenth of the company, and I write on my blog, verynormal.info about AI, software, and other ideas. What interests me right now is how agents are the new interaction layer between both building and using software.
Career accomplishment
I led the team that built the primary account-creation flow for Stripe Organizations. Stripe's enterprise feature for companies running many accounts. It's the main way users spin up accounts inside an org now. Four engineers. We had one of the highest StripeSat results in the org that year. People wanted to keep working together afterward.
Past year accomplishment
I run an internal newsletter at Stripe called AI Vibes. I started it in June 2025 with zero subscribers. It now reaches about a thousand weekly opt-in readers, roughly a tenth of the company. Patrick Collison showed it at an all-hands. It was highlighted in Stripe's 2026 strategy.
Every week I aggregate what's happening with AI across the company, and I translate it into something anyone at Stripe can read.
Most recent
I work on agentic commerce at Stripe. I joined in September 2025. I raised my hand. I think agents transacting on behalf of humans is one of the defining shifts coming in commerce, and I wanted to be working on it from the front rather than watching it happen. The hard problems are about trust and safety when the actor on the other end of the transaction isn't a person.
Growth arc
When I started at Stripe I did not have much experience navigating a big organization and operating within the fog of war that comes with massively complex systems. I built this skill up over the years and I got to replay it when I moved to agentic commerce last September, and the difference was obvious.
Where I'm heading next is the one job in tech. I increasingly believe product, design, and engineering roles are going to converge. The job will be solve problems with a computer and a team. Each discipline will approach the problem from a different vantage point.
The key is to leverage the spikiest skills we have and use the agents to help with the rest. For me I spike with focus, discipline, people and system legibility.
PodRead plug
Writing them down was only half. Huynh says you have to say them out loud until they stop feeling rehearsed. So I made a coaching script out of mine and pushed it through PodRead. Now I can practice on a run and you can listen to it too.
It's worth putting some thought and even practice into our stories because making a good first impression matters.
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