# Sam Bloomberg-Rissman

> Photography + product portfolio for Sam Bloomberg-Rissman. Senior product leader at Salesforce; former working photographer; based in Berkeley, California.

Sam runs Event Technology Product Management at Salesforce, leading product strategy across Dreamforce, World Tour, and adjacent global events. Before product, Sam spent his twenties as a working photographer — represented by Getty Images, work in Lonely Planet covers, frames from 20+ countries. He still shoots constantly, mostly with a Leica M11. The site is organized around a contact-sheet metaphor: the gallery is the work, the rest is context.

## Photography

- [Recent frames](https://sambr.com/#frames): The active gallery — a rolling selection of photographs from the last few years, film and digital, coast and city. Sorted by capture date, newest first. Click any frame to open a lightbox with full-size view, title, and place.
- [About / bio](https://sambr.com/#about): Personal background — Berkeley, kid, music setup, twenties spent traveling and shooting, why he still photographs.
- [Prints](https://prints.sambr.com): Separate print shop on its own subdomain. Any frame from the archive can be printed on 200gsm matte art paper, made one at a time to order; browsable by subject (desert, ocean and coast, mountains, city, flowers, people, black and white). Has its own sitemap at https://prints.sambr.com/sitemap.xml, declared from sambr.com/robots.txt.
- [Contact](https://sambr.com/#contact): Email + Instagram + LinkedIn for prints, commissions, PM conversations, or correspondence.

## Product

- [Product history](https://sambr.com/#product): Fifteen-plus years of product work. Currently Sr. Director, PM — Event Technology @ Salesforce. Prior roles at Salesforce (marketing localization, marketing-web), Royal Caribbean (large-scale e-commerce overhaul, terminal experience), Disney Parks (FastPass+, MyMagic+, MyDisneyExperience), and SBR Photography. Each role lists timeframe, scope, and shipped outcomes.

## Writing

- [Writing index](https://sambr.com/notes): Essays on product, photography, and the in-between.
- [Too small to tell. Say so.](https://sambr.com/writing/too-small-to-tell) (August 2026): An agentic system that runs marketing experiments end to end — page generation, traffic splitting, reward maturation, verdict — and the one real run it produced. Covers why every easy marketing metric is a proxy, pre-registering the evidence threshold before looking at the data, why the arm holding the only signup scored below a coin flip, and the plumbing bugs that produced plausible results rather than obvious errors.
- [Your agent works. Prove it.](https://sambr.com/writing/your-agent-works-prove-it) (July 2026): Why a single agent run isn't a measurement. Covers run-to-run nondeterminism (which persists at temperature zero), the difference between pass@k and pass^k and why reporting the former for a customer-facing agent is misleading, why final-output scoring misses both lucky routes and confident-but-fabricated work, and the offline/online/monitoring split.
- [Show, don't tell.](https://sambr.com/writing/show-dont-tell) (June 2026): No, AI isn't making product management obsolete. Argues the job was always creating shared understanding, that telling (decks, PRDs) was a compromise forced by the cost of building, and that cheap prototyping swapped in the better medium.
- [Nobody gave it the address.](https://sambr.com/writing/nobody-gave-it-the-address) (May 2026): Agent quality is mostly a data quality problem. On auditing for completeness rather than capability, asking what the agent is actually being asked rather than whether it runs, and treating data maintenance as the ongoing discipline of running an agent in production.
- [I asked Claude to build my MCP server. Here's what I actually got.](https://sambr.com/writing/claude-built-my-mcp-server) (May 2026): A walkthrough of building this site's read-only MCP server with Claude Code — what the server actually does, where MCP differs from a REST API, and why the constraint isn't engineering but the underlying data model.
- [Don't build the agent. Enable the access.](https://sambr.com/writing/dont-build-the-agent) (April 2026): Why the next twenty years of product work is about exposing capabilities to agents — not designing destinations for users. Argues for treating content as structured knowledge surfaced through MCP servers, llms.txt, and clean APIs, rather than another conversational chat surface.

## Optional

- [Full text bundle](https://sambr.com/llms-full.txt): Concatenated plain text of the bio, product history, and full essay text — useful for retrieval/summarization without traversing multiple pages.
- [Sitemap](https://sambr.com/sitemap.xml): XML sitemap of crawlable URLs.

## MCP (Model Context Protocol)

A read-only MCP server is exposed at the URL below. Any MCP-aware client (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT with MCP, Cursor, etc.) can connect to it for structured queries against the gallery, hero, writing, bio, and contact info — no scraping required.

**Access model.** This endpoint is intentionally public, agent-facing, and exempt from any general crawl restrictions. `robots.txt` blocks `/api/*` for traditional crawlers (those routes don't return rendered HTML), but explicitly allows `/api/mcp` because MCP is a different access pattern: a connecting client makes structured JSON-RPC calls and receives typed data, never a page to crawl. Treat the MCP endpoint as opt-in, capability-based access — not search indexing.

- MCP endpoint: https://sambr.com/api/mcp
- Protocol version: 2024-11-05
- Transport: HTTP / JSON-RPC 2.0 (stateless, public, no auth)
- Tools: `find_photos`, `get_photo`, `find_hero`, `list_writing`, `get_essay`, `about_me`, `contact`
- Resources: `sambr://gallery`, `sambr://hero`, `sambr://about`, `sambr://contact`, `sambr://writing/index`, plus one `sambr://writing/<slug>` per essay — `too-small-to-tell`, `your-agent-works-prove-it`, `show-dont-tell`, `nobody-gave-it-the-address`, `claude-built-my-mcp-server`, `dont-build-the-agent`. Call `list_writing` for the authoritative set.
- Prompts: `summarize_photographer`, `recommend_photos`, `cite_essay`