All Expertise

Product Strategy

I take products from concept to business case to market, decide where AI genuinely changes the product, and make the trade-offs that keep a roadmap honest.

At director scope, strategy is less about ideas than about choices: which problem is worth solving, what solving it is worth, what we won’t do, where AI genuinely changes the product and where a simpler rule does the job, and how the product will earn its keep. This is how I approach it, and where I’ve applied it.

Start from the customer problem, not the request

McLane360 began as a request to extend browser-based ordering. Framing the underlying customer problem instead — fragmented tools for finding promotions, placing orders and staying informed — turned it into a unified customer platform that our team took from concept to launch in six months.

Make the business case explicit

Significant investments should carry their own economics. At McLane I designed a vendor-agnostic product-data architecture whose business case rests on a projected seven-figure cost avoidance. Earlier, at Kale Industries, customer research across 12 cities set the pricing and go-to-market for two category-defining launches.

Decide what not to do

Roadmaps fail by trying to fix everything at once. At Storia that meant closing two of four markets and rebuilding around a lean team before growing again. At McLane it means steering trade-offs across two value workstreams and six epics every quarter. I wrote about the principle in Strategy: The Art of Not-Choosing.

Commercialize what you build

A capability becomes a business when it has a proposition, packaging and a price. At Frumatic I turned an in-house UX capability into a service line — team, operating model and client offer — that generated 20% of 2022 revenue with a 54% close-to-quote ratio. For ValuFact I designed four-tier packaging around usage-based AI costs. At Arena Computers, a new pricing strategy grew category revenue 41%.

Where I applied this

Methods I use: customer and market research, competitive analysis, business cases and cost-avoidance models, pricing and packaging, prioritization frameworks such as RICE, and go-to-market planning.