Product Leader & AI Specialist
You're not behind on AI.
You're just stuck.
They're not the same problem.
Everyone's selling AI. I'm more interested in your actual bottleneck. Sometimes AI is the answer. Often it's process, tooling, or decision-making. We fix the problem first. Then we use AI where it earns its place.
No 60-page decks. Just a straight conversation.
What you get
Save time.
Remove repetitive work and give your team their week back.
Save money.
Avoid expensive AI projects that never deliver.
Unlock higher-order work.
Let your best people focus on judgement, strategy and growth.
01The problem
You've probably:
- Bought licences few are using.
- Scrambled for an AI strategy before the last board meeting.
- Tried to integrate AI into the product and it didn't land.
- Seen your best people pulled into ad-hoc AI tasks they shouldn't be doing.
- Realised AI isn't the only problem.
Or maybe it's not about AI at all. The team ships slower than it used to. Reviews are slipping. You can feel the business needs to move and you can't find the lever.
02How I work
Most people run at the wrong solution.
They've already picked the answer, usually "AI", before anyone's checked what the real problem is. We're all brilliant at diagnosing a problem by leaping straight to a fix. Usually it's the wrong fix, for a problem we've misread.
So I get brutally clear on the problem first, and on how we'll actually solve it. That one step does more than any tool ever will.
AI is the salt in the salad.
It's probabilistic, not deterministic, and "usually right" is a terrifying thing to run a business on. So I take AI out of everything first, then sprinkle it back exactly where it earns its keep, and nowhere else. Fix the process. Add AI last.
How that plays out
Strategy & roadmap
A clear plan for where AI earns its place, and where it doesn't.
Team sessions
Get your people up to speed and speaking the same language.
Hands-on automation
Built on the stack you already have, not a new one.
On call
Me, working through the hard calls with you as they come.
Depending on the problem it might be one of these, or a mix. We scope it on the first conversation.
03Proof
As Head of Product at Caleb & Brown, I led the tooling and process changes behind results their vendors went on to publish:
Results I've delivered directly
Deployed Intercom's Fin AI on top of strong support content and resolved 7 in 10 inbound enquiries with no human involved. The part that proves the point: the content alone was already deflecting around 90% of would-be tickets before any AI touched it. Process first. AI amplified.
Why trust me with this
I've been doing this my whole career, long before it was fashionable. Early on I inherited a service centre that was missing its two-day turnaround target, and fixed it with something dead simple:
A different coloured bag for each day of the week, so anything overdue was visible across the room. No tech required. Just the right process.
Since then: led the most efficient integration teams at martech startups (millions in ARR, billions of events moved), co-founded campaigns like Boomervention for the 2022 federal election, drove what became the single biggest pre-COVID revenue line at Laneway Cups, and shipped a trade product that hit 70% of platform volume inside twelve months. I've launched plenty of startups. Most of them failed, which is where a lot of this was learned.
04About Dan
Found in translation.
Hi, I'm Dan. I've spent over a decade building products at the frontier of tech, always the early adopter, always the one pulling things apart to see how they work. I tinker so you don't have to. Then the things that actually hold up, real products and real processes, go into your business.
The hard part of this work was never the technology. It's the gap between the leaders setting the strategy and the teams who have to build it. I've spent my career in that gap, translating both directions. That's the job.
Book a 30-minute call
Let's find out if I can help.
Book a 30-minute call and we'll work through your problem at a high level: what's really going on, where the time and money are leaking, and whether there's something here worth doing together.
Field notes on AI implementation.
My take on AI, product, and the work that actually ships. Sent to senior leaders who want signal over noise.