About | Intent Management™

Keith Johnson

Author • Speaker • Leadership Consultant

Keith Johnson has spent his career helping organizations build leadership capability at the intersection of people, process, and technology. He works primarily with SaaS companies — consulting across product, engineering, sales, implementation, and account management — and has developed a reputation for helping leaders get clear on what they actually want from their teams before deploying new tools or approaches.

That work led directly to Intent Management™. After seeing the same failure mode repeat across clients navigating AI adoption — organizations investing heavily in AI tools while producing inconsistent or unusable output — Keith identified the root cause: leaders were adopting AI without a clear discipline for communicating intent to the humans and systems doing the work. Intent Management™ is the response to that problem.

The discipline is built from real implementation work, not academic research. It has been applied in working sessions with leadership teams across industries, refined through practical use, and documented in two books — including Alignment at Speed: Leading AI-Enabled Teams.

Keith's first book, Shifting Into Leadership, addresses a different but related challenge: the transition from individual contributor to team leader. That book grew from the same observation — that most organizations promote talented people into leadership roles without giving them a practical model for how to actually do the job.

He consults through Dolce Consulting, is available for keynotes and workshops, and works directly with leaders on advisory engagements. He is based in Carlsbad, California.

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Background

The Work Behind the Framework

Books Published

Shifting Into Leadership and Alignment at Speed — both built from real implementation experience and written for leaders who need practical guidance, not theory.

SaaS

Industry Focus

Deep consulting experience across product, engineering, sales, implementation, and account management functions in high-growth SaaS organizations.

Framework Creator

Developed the Intent Management™ framework from pattern recognition across dozens of client engagements — identifying the four elements that determine whether AI-enabled work succeeds or fails.

The Origin

Why Intent Management™?

Most leadership tools are built for a world where humans produce every output. Evaluate the work, give feedback, adjust. The feedback loop is slow enough that ambiguity gets resolved along the way.

AI breaks that loop. The volume of output increases, the speed increases, and the cost of unclear intent compounds faster than any team can correct for manually. What used to be a manageable gap becomes a systemic problem.

Intent Management™ exists because that problem needed a leadership response, not a technology one. The four elements — Outcome Definition, Evaluation Criteria, Decision Authority, and Constraint Boundaries — address the specific places where human-AI collaboration breaks down when the intent behind the work hasn't been made explicit.

It's not a technology discipline. It's a leadership discipline that applies wherever humans and AI work together on consequential tasks.

"AI doesn't fail
because it's wrong.
It fails because
no one told it
what right means."