Lean-Trail
AI makes building fast. Handoffs make it slow.
I help product organizations build autonomous teams that own customer outcomes from initial discovery to measurable impact.
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Lean-Trail
I help product organizations build autonomous teams that own customer outcomes from initial discovery to measurable impact.
Start a conversation
My expertise
I've coached and led product teams across ANZ and Germany — from early-stage startups to Trade Me, Xero, and Phocas. The work has always been the same: helping capable people develop the judgment and the skills to ship better outcomes faster.
How an engagement works
Phase 01
1–2 weeks
Assess
I come in and observe how the team actually works — not the org chart, but the real decisions. Where does a product idea turn into a ticket without anyone checking whether it should? Who can span the full build lifecycle, and who can't? Where is speed being lost to coordination that shouldn't be necessary?
The output is an honest map of the capability gaps and a coaching plan built around your actual work, not a generic curriculum.
Phase 02
4–8 weeks
Develop
Sessions built around real work, not case studies. Engineers work through actual product problems in their own codebase. PMs and designers prototype real features in AI tools. Every session is practice on a live decision, with direct coaching on the reasoning — not the theory.
This is the phase that does the work.
Phase 03
Ongoing · optional
Embed
New habits don't consolidate without sustained practice. This phase keeps the momentum going — regular check-ins, accountability on new ways of working, and compounding gains as confidence builds.
Not sure which area applies to your team? Let's just talk it through →
Areas of work
Best fit: engineering teams making more product decisions per week than ever — and not getting feedback on those decisions the way they would on their code.
When AI accelerates the build cycle, engineers decide more. Which direction to take a feature. Whether a behaviour is right for the user. Whether to build the thing at all. Most weren't trained for this — and it shows in the product, not in the code.
I coach engineers in the skills that turn good code into good products. Not PM fundamentals delivered to engineers — product craft adapted for people who already know the technical side.
Problem framing
Understanding why something should be built before deciding how — and what to look for when the answer might be "it shouldn't."
Customer and business judgment
Reading user behaviour, understanding commercial context, and connecting both to the technical decision in front of you.
Decision-making in ambiguity
How to make a good call with incomplete information, when waiting for certainty isn't an option.
Best fit: PMs and designers who are strong on strategy but handing off to engineers for anything that involves building — and losing speed and fidelity in that gap.
The gap between "here's what we need" and "here's a working version of it" used to require an engineer. With AI tools, it doesn't anymore — but only if you know how to use them.
I coach PMs and designers in the technical and build fluency to close that gap: AI prototyping tools, how to think about technical feasibility, and how to bring an idea far enough forward that engineers can make real decisions about it — not educated guesses.
AI tool fluency
Hands-on practice with the tools that let you turn an idea into something testable, without engineering resource.
Technical thinking
How to evaluate feasibility, understand trade-offs, and have a real conversation with engineers about what's worth building and why.
Prototype-driven validation
How to test an assumption with a working prototype before committing engineering time to building the real thing.
Best fit: leaders who want to change how the whole team operates, not just develop individuals.
Individual capability is necessary but not sufficient. If the habits around how decisions get made — who approves what, who gets heard, how ideas move from concept to build — don't change, individual development doesn't compound.
This area of work operates at the team level: where decisions are being delayed or escalated unnecessarily, what would need to change for them to be made closer to the work, and how to create the conditions where high-agency builders can actually operate that way.
Decision mapping
Identifying where decisions are being held at the wrong level — and what would need to change for them to move closer to the work.
Ways-of-working design
Practical changes to how the team plans, prioritises, and ships that reduce coordination overhead without losing quality or alignment.
Leader coaching
Working with the people setting the tone — how to create the conditions for high-agency work, and how to stay connected to the craft while running a team.
Building products in practice
newjourn
An AI-powered travel companion
Built in public
newjourn is a product I'm actively co-developing with Martin Heckmann. Agentic architecture, React 18, Supabase, Gemini 2.5 Flash. I'm doing the product work and significant parts of the build myself — prototyping, testing assumptions, making calls about what to cut and what to ship.
I'm documenting the journey publicly. What works, what doesn't, what I am learning. My goal is to share the tools, the frameworks, the lessons learned with this new generation of builders of digital products.
About me
13 years of product leadership and coaching across ANZ and Germany — from startup to enterprise B2B SaaS. I've built the full-stack product capability I now help teams develop. The experience below is selected for relevance to this work. Full profile on LinkedIn →
Phocas
PM Capability · Design Sprint Leadership
Designed the PM capability framework that defines how the product team develops judgment — across customer value, business viability, and AI fluency. Ran an organisation-wide Design Sprint that produced 27+ prototypes aligned to a new strategic direction. The sprint wasn't about the prototypes. It was about what happened when the whole organisation was given a direction and permission to explore it with their own hands.
Xero
Product Leadership · Platform & Growth
Built the Platform Product Management team from the ground up and set the standard for how platform PMs operate and deliver measurable value. Led growth work that grew US paid conversion by more than 10 percentage points — NZD $7.2M in first-year LTV — by redesigning the subscription experience to match how US customers actually buy. Started as a local experiment. Became a global rollout.
Trade Me
Product Delivery Coach
Established product discovery practices across squads — the discipline of validating whether a problem is real before writing a line of code. Coached a chapter of Product Owners through the 2020 COVID disruption, keeping teams grounded in customer evidence when urgency was pulling everyone toward reactive building.
Lean-Trail, Berlin
Product Consultant and Coach · 2018
Consulted with early-stage companies on modern product practices. Led product delivery for mBook, enabling Germany's largest school book publishing company to bring their first 100% digital product to market — with a team that had never shipped digital before.
Get in touch
I work with a small number of teams at a time. Reach out directly.