Executive Product Leader
I lead product for B2B software businesses moving from exploratory growth to deliberate scaling: a clear vision, real focus, and an AI-enabled product organisation that delivers the highest value first, fast, predictably and repeatably.
Product leadership across private equity-backed SaaS, global telecoms, industry-body and venture-backed start-up environments.
A clear direction for the product, and the portfolio choices that follow from it. Deciding what the platform is, which segments it serves and, importantly, what will not be built.
ProofSet the platform direction across three product lines at Sport Alliance, and as the senior-most product executive at Cleverbridge.
Bringing acquired products onto one platform. The work is choosing the target platform, rebuilding only the capabilities that matter most on it, and migrating customers deliberately rather than all at once.
ProofBrought PerfectGym, Magicline and MySports onto one platform after the PerfectGym acquisition.
Opening a platform so that partners build on it, and getting organisations with competing interests to commit to something shared.
ProofMore than 25,000 live integrations on the Sport Alliance open API and developer portal. Earlier, the RCS ecosystem of more than 90 operators at Deutsche Telekom and the GSMA.
Agentic products that solve real customer problems, and product teams that use AI in discovery and decision-making before they use it in delivery.
ProofMagicAI Chat and MagicAI Engage at Sport Alliance, and a product organisation rebuilt around AI.
Operating models, governance and leadership teams that make a product organisation predictable.
ProofBuilt from the ground up at Cleverbridge, rebuilt around AI at Sport Alliance.
Where I stand: product in the age of AI
AI is making software faster and cheaper to build. That makes deciding what to build—and what to leave out—more important. The temptation is to build more simply because we can. But every feature still has to be maintained, supported, explained and sold. Cheap building doesn’t make the wrong product decision better.
Faster delivery only helps if we’re building the right things. AI can help us make those decisions, while also changing our understanding of what’s possible. That calls for rethinking both how we do product work and the products we build.
Product decisions depend on making sense of incomplete evidence: what customers say, how they behave, what the business needs and what the technology allows. AI can connect evidence across those sources better than we have ever done before, surface patterns and help us explore more possibilities.
That changes the depth of our thinking as much as the pace of our work. We can challenge assumptions earlier, prototype and iterate faster, and revisit decisions as new evidence emerges. Product judgement remains essential: deciding which problems matter, weighing the trade-offs and knowing when the evidence is strong enough to act.
At Sport Alliance, I put this into practice through a shared product harness with AI skills connected to our codebase, planning and customer tools. Within three weeks, the whole team was using it, with 70% becoming power users.
AI expands software’s role from recording and organising information to helping people understand it and act on it. It can surface patterns, anticipate needs and make work faster and easier—or enable ways of working that previously required too much time, expertise or coordination.
That requires intelligence and action to be built into the product’s core workflows. AI needs the context to offer relevant insight and the ability to carry out work directly, with human judgement where it matters. The opportunity is to rethink how the product is used to understand, decide and act, rather than adding AI on top of an unchanged experience.
That is the direction behind MagicAI Engage, which connects predictions about member risk with proactive outreach, and MagicAI Chat, which books sessions and changes memberships directly in the platform, bringing in staff when needed.
Some companies need a permanent product leader for this work, others an interim one with a defined mission, a fixed term and real authority. These are the situations I am brought into, in either role.
Two or more product lines after a deal, and a decision to make about what becomes one platform.
Product has to become a function the business can rely on, with the leadership, cadence and governance that requires.
Too many products, too many commitments, and investment spread too thinly to move any of them.
Making the product, its roadmap and its economics legible to an acquirer or investor.
Moving from scattered experiments to a standard way of working with AI across discovery, decisions and delivery.
I also advise boards, investors and leadership teams on these questions, drawing on a background that started in consulting.
English and Afrikaans (native), German and Dutch (business fluent).
I speak on platforms, ecosystems and how AI is reshaping the software development lifecycle.
UpcomingInMerge Summit, Baku, 30 November – 1 December 2026. “The Ecosystem Advantage: Why Platforms Win the Next Decade”.
Earlier: Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, GSMA events across Europe, the United States and Asia, and the Rich Communication Forum.
For a conversation about a role, a mandate or a speaking engagement, write to me. My CV is available on request.