Product Building

Most product people spend a career inside one industry, on one side of the table — agency people who never carried inventory risk, founders who never had to build to someone else’s brief. My product education came from crossing both lines, repeatedly, for over twenty years. That’s the skill this page is claiming.

Where this comes from: the web guy was always the product guy

For two decades I was the web guy for businesses across a genuinely odd range of industries — skin care, automotive, food service, fashion, professional services, and more. Here’s what that job title hides: in a small business, nobody hands the web guy a spec. You get handed an industry and have to work out what the offer actually is, how it’s packaged and priced and photographed, what makes this category’s buyer trust or bolt, and how to know whether any of it worked. That’s product work wearing a web-development badge.

Do it once and you’ve learned one client’s business. Do it across a dozen industries and you learn something rarer: which product problems are universal and which are category-specific. A skin-care buyer and a vintage-watch buyer share almost nothing — except the handful of things that matter everywhere. Knowing which is which is the part of product expertise that can’t be learned inside a single industry, because you’d have nothing to compare against.

The other side of the table

Then there’s the owner’s seat, where I’ve spent the last decade in parallel: my own e-commerce brands — vintage hats, and now luxury timepieces with a partner who brings deep vintage-watch expertise — plus the Strategic Intelligence Engine, a software product taken from idea to production the long way.

The owner’s side teaches what the contractor’s side can’t: consequence. Your inventory, your margin, your maintenance burden, your name on the door when the product decision was wrong. It’s why my product instincts run to unfashionable places — minimum viable scope, the total cost of maintaining a thing after the launch party, and my father’s last piece of business advice, which I treat as a product principle: don’t give up financial control.

Right now I’m doing both simultaneously — employed full-time applying these skills in-house, owner of live ventures on nights and weekends. Contractor discipline and owner consequence, in the same week, every week. Very few product resumes can say that, and it shows up in the work: I build for other people like an owner, and I run my own things with a hired builder’s discipline.

How I think about it

• The offer before the artifact. Most failed products are failures of definition, not execution — nobody stated plainly what was being sold, to whom, against what alternative. Sound familiar? It’s problem deduction applied to commerce.
• Ship small, maintain forever. A product’s real cost begins after launch. Scope that ignores maintenance isn’t ambition; it’s borrowing.
• Presentation is product. Photography, copy, condition honesty, trust signals — in commerce these aren’t marketing on top of the product; for the buyer, they are the product until the box arrives.
• Keep the keel. Partner, delegate, collaborate — but never lose sight of the money. Product decisions made by whoever controls the spreadsheet are the ones that stick.

The proof

The portfolio is the ledger in public: products built for others across many industries (names on request), and products owned outright — the stores, the engine, this site. Product building is also among the five skills I employ full-time in my current in-house role, which means the skill’s market price is being paid as you read this.