I am most useful when the product work is unclear

I started in customer service, payments, fraud and live operations, then moved into product at King. That background still shapes how I work. I notice the manual work, the unwritten decisions and the edge cases that are easy to miss when a product is only ever seen through its interface.

After fourteen years at King I took proper time away before deciding what came next, around four months of it on a bike. Then product roles at Lendo and Clearon.

Nine years of it has covered payment flows, subscriptions, insurance, consent, third party integrations, fraud tooling and internal operational systems. The common thread is not an industry or a feature. It is taking something complicated and making it easier to understand, decide on and deliver.

I am hands on during discovery. I use Claude and Codex to prototype flows, build small working tools and expose missing states before engineering commits real time. Prototype code is not production software. The point is to shorten the distance between an idea and something a team can argue with.

I care more about what changed than about product theatre. A good change might improve conversion. It might just as well remove repetitive work, lower operational risk or make a complicated system easier to maintain.

Most of my leadership has been as a Product Owner, which means leading almost entirely without authority. I hold the final call on product decisions, but I would rather reach one through discussion than announce it. The people I work with usually know their craft better than I do, so my job is to keep the goal clear, remove what is in the way, and make the work easy to get on with.

I try to keep things calm, with no manufactured urgency and as little stress passed down the line as I can manage. I take the outside noise so the team can concentrate. I listen, and I change my mind when someone is right.

Earlier at King I led a small second line payments and risk team directly, which taught me the same lesson from the management side. People do their best work when they trust whoever is leading them and are not being pulled in five directions.

Family and friends, reading, far too many television series, and the bike when I can get out on it. Gravel and bikepacking mostly, partly because they reward the same habits. Understand the situation, work with what you have, find a sensible way forward.

I work best with people who are open about their constraints, willing to have their assumptions challenged, and more interested in a good outcome than in defending their own solution.