How I Might Help.

Dynamic Product Leadership Within Technology Product Companies

Since 2017 my career has focused on machine learning and data science products. In addition to owning strategy and innovation, I am often responsible for deepening the product culture and core professional competency, and for helping product professionals navigate their careers. What I do within these roles depends on the culture, needs and problems within the product function, and on the long-term goals and desired outcomes of the company.

I have led book clubs, supported technology enablement and continuing education, developed knowledge academy initiatives, and provided coaching to facilitate the thinking and workshops of research, engineering and data science talent. The free tools on this site are examples of the kinds of self-assessment I make available to product leaders to help them take charge of their own careers.

Big-Company Know-How, Sized for Your Business

I’ve spent twenty years helping large companies rethink how they attract, engage and transact with their customers. Small business owners face the same questions with far less time and no team to hand them to. I bring the same thinking, sized to your business and your budget, so you leave with decisions made and next steps you can actually take.

We might sharpen what you sell and who it’s for, fix the moments where customers drop away, choose and set up the right digital tools, find sensible ways to use AI that save you real hours, or build a simple plan for the next ninety days. I’ll tell you plainly what I think is worth doing, what can wait and what isn’t worth your money.

A Trusted Collaborator to Boards and Leaders

I provide board services to innovators globally, including coaching for leaders across industries. I help boards thrash out everything from vision to strategy and governance.

I help leaders find clarity in their thinking, in what they want and intend to achieve, and in those moments when they feel stretched to their personal capacity to thrive. You already know how to lead, and you are an expert in your industry. It is the tasks around the core role of leader that have grown. My role is to help you get clear on the issues, and on the approach that fits your leadership style and your particular constraints and opportunities. I am trained and certified by the Center for Executive Coaching, an International Coaching Federation accredited programme.

Hands-On Training, with Real Work to Show for It

I am a long-serving senior product leader and an experienced speaker, with more than fifty keynotes behind me. I have been known across the product, lean and agile family of practices for the past twenty years and am fully certified across them. I have tailored capability assessments and created meaningful toolkits for numerous companies, and I have rebuilt the approach to training itself: a classroom in which participants build the real-world deliverables that may have sat on the back burner for some time.

We bring together learning about a topic and practising it immediately, using custom GPTs that give active coaching and feedback on the specific product artefact under discussion. Participants come away with actual product work completed, ready to use in workshops, product meetings and conversations with their stakeholders. No more talking heads on a screen discussing theory. It is private, in-house training, designed for the needs of your product community. I do not currently offer public cohort training, and all training materials are tailored specifically to your organisation before we use them. For individuals, I offer a generic toolkit, the Product Field Kit, for a one-off fee; I do not currently license it for team, scaled or enterprise use.

I also facilitate key workshops directly, using Liberating Structures, executive coaching tools and LEGO® Serious Play®. Product discovery and delivery are a particular strength: in a multi-day workshop we can take a team from no written documentation to a meaningful vision, a strategy and a beautifully structured story map.

Workshops That Leave a Team with Something They Made Together

Each of these is a half day or a full day, designed around the team in front of me rather than a fixed script.

• LEGO® Serious Play®: team identity and purpose. Who we are, what we are for and how we want to work, built in bricks and agreed in words.
• LEGO® Serious Play®: product vision and the customer. A shared model of the customer, the problem and the product we intend to build, with the disagreements surfaced early while they are cheap.
• Story mapping and roadmapping. From an idea or a backlog to a structured story map, a release plan and an outcome-based roadmap the team can defend.
• Discovery sprints. Opportunity framing, assumption mapping, customer interviews and synthesis, run as a working week rather than a lecture.
• Strategy and objective setting. Vision, strategy and quarterly objectives for a product area or a whole function, with a visual record to take away.
• Retrospectives that change something. Liberating Structures such as 1-2-4-All, TRIZ and What, So What, Now What, for teams and for leadership groups.
• Brain Trust reviews. Candid, structured critique of work in progress, in the manner I learned coaching at Pixar.
• Working agreements and team charters. For new teams, merged teams and teams returning from a difficult quarter.