Senior product leader · Cape Town, UTC+2 · working worldwide
I’m Joe da Silva. I turn bespoke, client-funded work into reusable platform capability, and I’ve done it as an agency MD, a venture-backed founder, an enterprise director, and a solo builder. I’m now taking a senior product mandate: Head of Product, VP Product, CPO, or Head of AI Product — permanent, interim or fractional.
Portrait of Joe da Silva
Photograph to be supplied — no stand-ins, no stock
01 — The receipts
The limit is part of the evidence, not a footnote. Colour marks the lane — leadership, consulting, building; the four pips mark confidence, light to full saturation.
Excellence in Innovation
Banking Product — Global Banking & Finance Awards 2022
Absa Chat Banking; Absa also named Best Digital Bank South Africa, 2022
Publicly verifiable third-party validation — which is exactly why it leads. It removes the need to defend an internal metric.
142M+
automated FAQ interactions — Absa Chat Banking
Director, Interact Chat Products & AI, Clickatell, 2022–2023
I commissioned and negotiated the NLP supplier architecture and set the usage-based commercial structure. I did not build the model, and I had left before this was measured.
224%
year-on-year growth, Clickatell’s AI-enabled Chat Commerce platform
Clickatell, 2022–2023
I piloted the AI capability the growth is attributed to. I did not deliver the growth and I wasn’t there when it was measured. Downstream evidence, not a claim.
Feb 2022
Camvas deck roadmapping intelligent summarisation, semantic search and automated transcription
Before the LLM ecosystem commoditised all three
Proves foresight and thesis selection, not implementation. The deck is dated — judge the dates.
3×
Bookmarks awards — Sarie.com and YourParenting.co.za, 2011 and 2012
SA digital industry awards, for Media24 titles
Agency work, delivered by a team I hired and led. What is mine: the studio produced them three times.
£70,066
total Camvas spend through month 8
Founders Factory + Guardian Media Group venture, 2021–2022
Most pre-seed founders burn £200–500k by month 8. This was structured, invoiced and allocated across two entities under Founders Factory governance.
Hired, backed or retained by
Barclays Global Investors · Bupa · Cancer Research UK · Skrill · Paysafe · Powa · 4finance · Simply Business · TransferGo · hiber · Founders Factory · Guardian Media Group · Clickatell · Absa
02 — The record
Agency MD · 2007–2013 · Cape Town
I ran the studio end-to-end for six years: the P&L, the hiring, the org chart across ten disciplines, and the work itself. Sixty-two clients, from banks to wineries to national sports bodies — their logos below are the chapter’s evidence.
The pattern, run #1 — agency scale: sixty-two bespoke client builds, distilled into a studio that could repeat them.
Sixty-two of the studio’s clients, 2007–2013. Greyscale at rest — colour on hover, like the memory.
“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.”
Founder & CEO · 2021–2022 · Founders Factory + Guardian Media Group
A venture-backed startup run on governance rather than adrenaline: a distributed team, a real advisory board, and spend that was structured, invoiced and allocated across two entities — to the pound.
The pattern, run #2 — venture scale: the same bespoke-to-platform move, this time with investors’ money and a dated deck that called the AI wave early.
Burn discipline — month 8
Frugality here is a governance outcome, not a personality trait: two entities, Founders Factory oversight, every pound invoiced.
Director · 2022–2023
My job was to make AI chat banking possible for a major bank without a capital budget. I commissioned the NLP supplier architecture behind Absa Chat Banking and set a usage-based commercial structure — no CapEx — so the bank paid for what worked, not for what was promised.
The pattern, run #3 — enterprise scale: one bank’s bespoke requirement became a supplier architecture any client could use, priced per use.
The structure was the product: the supplier deal, not the model, is what I built. Saturation marks where my hands were.
2024 — now · Cape Town
No team, no budget line, no excuses: nine agentic systems designed and shipped solo. The technical decisions are made in writing — including choosing pgvector entity resolution over Neo4j/GraphRAG, with the reasoning recorded before the code.
The pattern, run #4 — solo scale: bespoke agentic builds, each one collapsing into reusable platform capability.
Nine systems, one hue. The tab at full saturation: pgvector entity resolution — a written decision, not a default.
03 — Community
Anyone can claim a network. I founded the rooms, brought the speakers, and left one of them running without me.
Opened by Marty Cagan, sponsored by Google and sli.do. A decade later it has 1,966 members and a 4.7★ average — an institution, not a gig.
Seventeen free events in eighteen months, scheduled across four timezones, built from a standing start with no team and no budget.
Marty Cagan opened my first product community in 2014. He returned for my second — Remote Product #14 — in 2020, the week EMPOWERED shipped.
Fifteen of the people who gave Remote Product their time
04 — Work together
The point of this site
An executive product mandate: Head of Product, VP Product, CPO or Head of AI Product. From one day a week to full time — fractional, interim or permanent. If the seat exists, I want the conversation.
Fixed scope, fixed shape
A defined problem, a named deliverable, two to six weeks. No retainers. You get the artefact; I get out of the way.
Venture build, shared risk
A build over three to twelve months, with risk shared. For founders and studios who want an operator in the room, not an advisor on a call.
Most people arrive at 01 and never need the rest. That is a good outcome.
05 — Not a fit
If the strategy is done and the job is execution against a stable plan, I am the expensive wrong shape.
Hire a strong delivery-led senior PM. Bring me in for a fixed-scope consult at the moment the roadmap itself becomes the question.
One industry, one stack, ten years deep — that is not the shape of my career.
Hire the specialist. My value is the pattern across contexts; a consult can frame the problem before you write the specialist’s job spec.
Hours, badges, office days. The last two years were built solo and remote; that will not change.
Don’t book the call. If you measure outcomes rather than attendance, do.