The scenic route to product

I didn’t come to product by a straight line — I came in through the studio door.

I started in design, where I learned that every pixel is an argument and the best arguments win quietly. Then came the crossing into product: as a founding hire at Pivotal’s Dallas office I helped companies turn practices into products; at Cazoo I joined at the very beginning and helped build the UK’s first fully digital car-buying experience, staying through hyper-growth all the way to its IPO. At StepStone I led experience design globally and shipped some of the earliest LLM-powered products in European recruitment. And most recently at Sainsbury’s — one of Britain’s largest retailers — I led product for enterprise AI, ML and data platforms, taking production AI from a handful of experiments to a genuine platform serving millions of customers.

Somewhere along the way I fell for data — not dashboards for their own sake, but the discipline of letting reality vote on our plans. It turned out to be the connective tissue between every chapter.

in·ten·tion·aut (n.) — one who navigates by intention. Chooses direction deliberately, before choosing speed.

The word is invented, but the instinct is old. I studied theology before I ever opened a design tool — years of training in asking why before anyone gets to agree on what. And time spent organising volunteers in the wake of Hurricane Sandy taught me that organisations behave like products: the way people move through them can be designed. Every roadmap hides a question underneath it — why this, why now, why us — and most stalled work traces back to one that never got answered.

My job is getting a team to that answer quickly — and keeping it honest while it earns its keep in shipped product, customer-loved experiences and results the board can see.

How I work

• Translate, don’t gatekeep. I speak designer, engineer, analyst and executive — and I move ideas between them intact.
• Evidence over ego. Strong opinions, loosely held, tightly tested.
• Prototype to decide. The cheapest way out of an argument is usually a rough version everyone can react to.
• Software is made of people. Putting the soft back in software isn’t a slogan — it’s the operating principle.

If any of that sounds like the teammate you’ve been missing, say hello.