Product leadership · Cape Town → global · 25 years

Four times,the same pattern.At four scales.

I turn bespoke, client-funded work into reusable platform capability — as an agency MD, a venture-backed founder, a director inside a CPaaS platform, and now building agentic AI systems. Most recently that pattern produced a chat-banking architecture a bank still runs at national scale.

Start a conversation → See the receipts

Built product inside Barclays Global InvestorsBupaCancer Research UK Skrill · PaysafePowaSimply Business TransferGohiberFounders Factory Guardian Media GroupClickatellAbsa

01 —
Track record

One pattern, run four times, at four scales.

Bespoke client work, progressively productised into platform. The scale changed every time; the move did not. This is the spine of the career and the reason the lanes reinforce rather than scatter.

01 · 2007–2013

Agency MD

FormFunction Digital · Cape Town

Six-year P&L, up to 30 contractors, an org chart across ten disciplines. Bespoke engineering for media-group enterprise clients; service lines productised as the patterns matured.

62 clients · 3 national awards

02 · 2021–2022

Founder & CEO

Camvas · Founders Factory + Guardian Media Group

Productised the integration thesis — Workspace, Teams and Slack connectors against a 16-connector platform roadmap. Eight people across four countries, eight-person advisory board.

5,000+ signups · £70k to month 8

03 · 2022–2023

Director, Chat Products & AI

Clickatell · Cape Town

Commissioned a single client-funded NLP integration that compounded into platform capability — on a no-CapEx, usage-based commercial structure negotiated during a funding-constrained period.

142M+ interactions · award-winning

04 · 2024–now

Independent builder

ProductAnywhere · agentic systems

Nine shipped projects, each documenting reusable platform patterns designed to lift across domains. Entity resolution on pgvector after a written decision against Neo4j and GraphRAG.

9 systems · architecture published

signal → pilot → receipt → platform · the ventures are the R&D lab for the leadership

02 —
Receipts

Every number here tells you what it isn't.

These are the strongest figures I have. Each carries the limit of my own claim to it — because you were going to ask anyway, and because a number without its attribution is just a number.

Leader · Clickatell

142M+

Automated FAQ interactions served by Absa Chat Banking, on the NLP architecture I commissioned.

What I did not doI commissioned and negotiated the supplier architecture and set the usage-based commercial structure. I did not build the model, and I had left before this was measured.

proof/absa-142m-faq-deflection · confidence: medium-high

Leader · external validation

Award

Excellence in Innovation — Banking Product, Global Banking & Finance Awards 2022. Absa also named Best Digital Bank South Africa.

Why this one leadsPublicly verifiable and third-party. It removes the need to defend any internal metric — the strongest of the Absa proof points for exactly that reason.

proof/absa-excellence-innovation-award · confidence: high

Builder · Camvas

Feb 2022

A pitch deck roadmapping intelligent summarisation, semantic search and automated transcription — before the LLM ecosystem commoditised all three.

How to read itDon't take my word for the foresight. The deck is dated and I'll send it. It proves thesis selection and product judgement — not that I built LLM-grade features pre-LLM.

proof/camvas-pre-llm-ai-foresight · confidence: high

Expert · FormFunction

3×

Bookmarks awards — South Africa's digital industry awards. Sarie.com and YourParenting.co.za, 2011 and 2012, for Media24 titles.

Shared creditAgency work, delivered by a team I led and hired. The awards are the client's and the team's as much as mine. What's mine is that the studio produced them three times.

proof/formfunction-bookmarks-awards · confidence: high

03 —
Clients

Sixty-two brands, one studio, six years.

FormFunction Digital, 2007–2013 — the first iteration of the pattern. Media groups, telcos, law firms, conservancies and federations. Recovered from the studio's own archive.

Centre for Conflict Resolution

MetroFM

Pure

19 industries · publishing, telecoms, legal, sport, travel, agriculture, education Cape Town · 2007–2013

62named client brands

30contractors at peak

3Bookmarks awards

6 yrsowner-managed P&L

“FormFunction's quick and professional service, the can-do mentality, and the collaborative nature of our relationship have been the key to the success of sarie.com, the second largest women's website in SA.” Maryke Cumpsty · Digital Editor, Sarie.com · Media24

04 —
Community

They all said yes.

Seventeen events in eighteen months, free, remote, built solo from a standing start in lockdown — with no institution behind it. Convening is the most transferable thing on this page: it is the same skill a mandate is actually buying.

1,966ProductTank Cape Town members today — still running, without me

4.7★from 91 ratings across 22 events

17Remote Product events, Apr 2020 → Sep 2021

4timezones scheduled per event — global-first by design

Roman Pichlerauthor, How to Lead in Product Management

Jeff Gothelfauthor, Lean UX

Joe Leechauthor, Psychology for Designers

Clement Kaoco-founder, Product Manager HQ

Alex MitchellDirector of Product, Kin

Sarah WaldnerSenior PM, GitLab

Marcus WermuthEngineering Manager, Buffer

Nataliya AltukhovaRemote PM Educator

Rachel HamlinPM Career Coach

Greg PrickrilPM Career Coach

Matthew Mottolaauthor, The Human Cloud

Dave MartinProduct Leader, RightToLeft

Ross ChapmanRemote Design Sprint Consultant

Sandy LamSoftware AG

Zayn BloreSimplify Change

August 2014: I opened ProductTank Cape Town — the first in Africa — with Marty Cagan on stage, sponsored by Google and sli.do. December 2020: no room at all, and Cagan again, for Remote Product #14, the week EMPOWERED shipped. Between them, a decade of showing up for a discipline that had almost no infrastructure on the continent when I started.

Portraits shown are speakers whose images survive in the archive. Marty Cagan, Janna Bastow, Itamar Gilad, Giff Constable and Randy Silver also spoke — their portraits are still to be sourced.

05 —
Engage

Three ways in. One is the point.

I'm looking for the right executive mandate. The other two exist because good work sometimes starts smaller — not because I'd rather sell you a sprint.

01 · primary

Hire

Executive mandate · 1 day/wk → full time

Head of Product, VP Product, CPO or Head of AI Product. Governance-heavy and regulated environments welcome — that's where the last decade was spent.

0→1 and 1→N product organisations
AI on rails: governed, audit-ready
Commercial literacy at board level
Fractional, interim or permanent

Start the conversation →

Consult

Scoped engagement · 2–6 weeks

Fixed scope, named deliverables, a price band before a proposal. No open-ended retainers.

AI readiness and implementation
Growth diagnostics
Product-org assessment

See engagement shapes

Collaborate

Venture build · 3–12 months

Founder-operator, shared risk. Venture studios, accelerators, and hard problems worth a whiteboard.

Venture architecture
Agentic systems and platforms
Product advisory, NED

Talk about a build

06 —
Not a fit

Three times you shouldn't hire me.

Each comes with what to do instead — naming a problem and walking away from it isn't honesty, it's a shrug.

You need AI added to a product that isn't working yet.

AI will make a bad product fail faster and more expensively.

InsteadFix activation first. That's a product problem, and a good PM costs less than I do.

Your leadership hasn't agreed that this matters.

Transformation work without executive buy-in becomes an expensive internal argument.

InsteadGet one sponsor with budget authority to say it out loud, then call me.

You want a pure people-manager who won't touch the architecture.

I'll be in the system design, and I'll have opinions about the stack. For some orgs that's friction.

InsteadHire a delivery-focused HoP. If you want someone who reads the repo, that's me.