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 moves the constraint upstream, to the decision about what to build, and makes that decision more costly to get wrong. Cheap building erodes the discipline of deliberately not building something, while every feature still has to be maintained, supported, explained and sold.
The advantage is speed with accuracy, not speed alone. So AI belongs first in discovery and decision-making, and then in the product itself: built in, not bolted on.
Product-thinking is core to rethinking how software is built.
MagicAI Chat is an agent that does more than answer: it books trial sessions, pauses contracts and changes memberships directly in the platform, around the clock, and hands over to staff with full context when a person is needed. MagicAI Engage predicts which members are at risk and reaches them on the channel they respond to. At Cleverbridge, the same idea came earlier: a model predicting subscription churn, with workflows that acted on it.
At Sport Alliance I led the rebuild of how the product organisation works with AI. The team’s product harness, with more than 20 standardised skills connected to the codebase and to planning and customer tools, reached 100% adoption within three weeks, with 70% of the team becoming power users. Together with Engineering, we redesigned the development lifecycle so that AI-assisted discovery and specification feed straight into agentic delivery.
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.