Holding the whole in view.
What a product is, what it could become, and what needs to happen between the two.
I work alongside founders and teams as a thinking partner, questioning assumptions and helping resolve decisions that don’t sit neatly within one discipline. I help recognise where a product is strong, where it isn’t yet convincing, and which possibilities deserve more attention—then work backwards into decisions about what to build, what to leave out, and how to tell its story.
The more a team can build, the more it depends on judgment: taste, technical fluency, and an understanding of the people you’re building for. It also depends on someone paying attention to how those things fit together.
Practice
I spent six years on a founding team, working between engineering, product, and business development. I was the person people came to when something wasn’t clicking, or when a difficult decision needed thinking through.
Working alongside exceptional specialists taught me how to ask questions when I wasn’t the expert, follow the technical detail, and recognise when individually sound answers weren’t adding up.
Sometimes that meant noticing that teams were building toward different things without realising it. Sometimes it meant thinking out loud with the founder, keeping sight of the whole product while everyone else was deep in their own discipline.
The other part of the work is direction: sensing where a product is soft before it shows up in the numbers, and telling the possibilities that matter from the ones that are merely possible—then keeping the story coherent as the product changes.
Fingerspitzengefühl. A sensitivity that comes from years of paying close attention. It doesn’t make you infallible. It makes you less wrong, more often.
Contact
Working together takes one of two shapes. Sometimes it’s a few conversations: an outside view, offered as exactly that. Otherwise it means working close to the team, near enough to see how decisions actually get made, rather than advising from a distance.
If something here resonates, I’d be glad to hear what you’re working on.
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