Joe da Silva · ProductAnywhere

[ PHOTOGRAPH PLACEHOLDER:
JOE DA SILVA ]

Executive Product Leadership

Available for senior deployment (Head of Product / VP Product / CPO / Head of AI Product). This document contains verified telemetry, operational history, and architectural limits to inform your hiring mandate.

Operational Architecture

One pattern, run four times, at four scales: turning bespoke, client-funded work into reusable platform capability.

01 / The Expert

Agency MD

FormFunction Digital, 2007–2013. Six-year P&L, up to 30 contractors, org chart across ten disciplines. 62 clients. 3 national awards.

02 / The Builder

Founder & CEO

Camvas, 2021–2022. Founders Factory + Guardian Media Group. 8 people across 4 countries, 8-person advisory board. 5,000+ signups. £70,066 spend to month 8.

03 / The Leader

Director, Chat Products & AI

Clickatell, 2022–2023. Commissioned the NLP architecture behind Absa Chat Banking on a no-CapEx usage-based structure.

04 / The Builder

Independent Builder

2024–now. Nine shipped agentic systems; pgvector entity resolution after a written decision against Neo4j/GraphRAG.

Verified Telemetry

Outcomes carry their limits. Evidence is graded by saturation (confidence).

142M+
automated FAQ interactions, Absa Chat Banking.
Limit: 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.
Excellence
in Innovation
Banking Product, Global Banking & Finance Awards 2022; Absa also named Best Digital Bank South Africa.
Limit: Publicly verifiable third-party validation — which is exactly why it leads; it removes the need to defend an internal metric.
224%
YoY growth on Clickatell's AI-enabled Chat Commerce platform.
Limit: 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.
Limit: Proves foresight and thesis selection, not implementation. The deck is dated — judge the dates.
3×
Bookmarks awards (SA digital industry awards) — Sarie.com and YourParenting.co.za, 2011 & 2012, Media24 titles.
Limit: Agency work, delivered by a team I led and hired. What's mine is that the studio produced them three times.
£70,066
Camvas spend through 8 months.
Limit: Most pre-seed founders burn £200–500k by month 8; this was structured, invoiced and allocated across two entities under Founders Factory governance.

Ecosystem & Integration

Deployments across scale and sector.

Employers: Barclays Global Investors, Bupa, Cancer Research UK, Skrill · Paysafe, Powa, 4finance, Simply Business, TransferGo, hiber, Founders Factory, Guardian Media Group, Clickatell, Absa.
"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

Convening Power

From opening the first ProductTank in Africa with Marty Cagan in 2014, to having him return for Remote Product #14 the week EMPOWERED shipped in 2020, community has always been the convening argument.

ProductTank Cape Town

Founded Aug 2014. First in Africa, opened by Marty Cagan, sponsored by Google and sli.do. Today: 1,966 members, 4.7★ from 91 ratings, 22 events — still running, without me.

Remote Product

17 events, Apr 2020 → Sep 2021. Free, remote, built solo from a standing start in lockdown, scheduled across four timezones.

Deployment Models

Mandates structured for leverage.

01. Hire

Executive mandate. 1 day/wk → full time.
Fractional, interim, or permanent.

02. Consult

Fixed scope. Named deliverables.
2–6 weeks, no retainers.

03. Collaborate

Venture build.
3–12 months, shared risk.

Most people arrive at 01 and never need the rest. That is a good outcome.

Incompatibility

Three reasons not to initiate deployment.

You need a pure project manager.

I build systems and shape product strategy; I do not spend my days chasing Jira tickets and gantt charts.

↳ Do this instead: Hire a certified PMP or Delivery Manager.

You want top-down feature factory execution without pushback.

If the roadmap is dictated by sales without discovery, my strategic capability is wasted.

↳ Do this instead: Hire a mid-level Product Owner.

You need a full-stack engineer who can also do product.

I commission, negotiate, and architect at the systems level, but I am not writing production code for your core application.

↳ Do this instead: Hire a Senior Tech Lead.