# Sam Bloomberg-Rissman

> A guide to Sam Bloomberg-Rissman, laid out like a printed travel guide. 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 (SBR Photography, 2001–2011): travel and lifestyle stock sold through Getty, Alamy and Blend Images, several Lonely Planet covers, frames from 20+ countries. He still shoots constantly, mostly with a Leica M11. The site is organised as a guidebook in four chapters: Plan Your Visit (/), Frames (/frames), Understand (/notes), Survival Guide (/about), with History (/work) and an Index (/a-z).

## Photography

- [Frames](https://sambr.com/frames): The archive, shelved by the light each frame was shot in (morning, midday, golden, blue hour, night) using the sun over Berkeley on the capture date. Every plate has its own page at https://sambr.com/frames/plate/N, where N is the plate number: the index in capture-date order, oldest first, so it never changes. Location is not indexed; captions carry the light and the clock.
- [Survival Guide](https://sambr.com/about): Directory A to Z (contact, agents, dangers and annoyances, looking for, opening hours, prints), the phrasebook, Our Story, Our Writer, and the colophon.
- [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/about#contact): Email is the front door; LinkedIn is the second door. Both open for jobs, PM conversations, prints, or correspondence.

## Product

- [History](https://sambr.com/work): Fifteen-plus years of product work, arranged by what the work was rather than by employer. 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

- [Understand](https://sambr.com/notes): The six essays, newest first, with a reading order.
- [Index](https://sambr.com/a-z): The A to Z of the guide and the map legend. The fastest way to anything.
- [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, generated from the archive so every plate page is listed.

## 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`