The spine: one pattern, run four times, at four scales
Turning bespoke, client-funded work into reusable platform capability.
Agency MD
Six-year P&L, up to 30 contractors, org chart across ten disciplines. 62 clients. 3 national awards.
Founder & CEO
8 people across 4 countries, 8-person advisory board. 5,000+ signups. £70,066 spend to month 8.
Director, Interact Chat Products & AI
Commissioned the NLP architecture behind Absa Chat Banking on a no-CapEx usage-based structure.
Independent builder
Nine shipped agentic systems; pgvector entity resolution after a written decision against Neo4j/GraphRAG.
Receipts
Each renders with its limit visible — never hidden behind an interaction.
automated FAQ interactions, Absa Chat Banking.
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.
Global Banking & Finance Awards 2022; Absa also named Best Digital Bank South Africa.
Publicly verifiable third-party validation — which is exactly why it leads; it removes the need to defend an internal metric.
YoY growth on Clickatell's AI-enabled Chat Commerce platform.
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.
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.
Bookmarks awards (SA digital industry awards) — Sarie.com and YourParenting.co.za, 2011 and 2012, for Media24 titles.
Agency work, delivered by a team Joe led and hired. What's his is that the studio produced them three times.
Camvas spend through 8 months.
Most pre-seed founders burn £200–500k by month 8; this was structured, invoiced and allocated across two entities under Founders Factory governance.
Community
Joe founded ProductTank Cape Town (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 him. He also founded Remote Product: 17 events, Apr 2020 → Sep 2021, free, remote, built solo from a standing start in lockdown, scheduled across four timezones. Cagan returned for #14 the week EMPOWERED shipped. The 2014→2020 Cagan bookend is the single best sentence available.
Remote Product Speakers
Engagement
Hire leads. Order: Hire (primary) → Consult → Collaborate.
Most people arrive at Hire and never need the rest. That is a good outcome.
Not a fit
Three reasons NOT to hire him — and what to do instead.
You need a hands-on IC who ships features daily.
Joe operates at the strategy-to-execution layer — defining what to build, why, and how to measure it. He does not write user stories or manage Jira boards.
Do this instead: Hire a senior product manager or technical product owner.
You expect AI to replace your entire product team overnight.
Joe’s work assumes human judgment remains central. His agentic systems are narrow, auditable, and augment — not replace — product teams.
Do this instead: Start with a focused pilot scoped to one workflow.
You want someone who will say yes to every request.
Joe’s value is saying no to misaligned work — rigorously, kindly, and with data.
Do this instead: Clarify your mandate and bring him in once you’re ready for disciplined execution.