The problem shows up in the interface. It lives in the decision infrastructure underneath.
Fractional product leadership for AI-native products that decide, recommend, and automate. With your team, I find the decision the product is waiting on, then design the answer and prototype it against your real system.
For founders, CEOs, CTOs, and product leaders at seed to Series B companies.
Thirty minutes. No deck, no pitch.
Booking one-week System Reads now. Open to a longer engagement.
Why people reach out
Your team already ships with AI. What's missing is the decision infrastructure. By that I mean the product logic, evidence, and controls that turn what the model can do into something customers can use without you.
This is for products where people have to answer for what the product decides.
You've tried the obvious moves already: a contract designer, a redesign, another round of onboarding. Activation still doesn't move.
You already have people building. A release or a new customer has exposed decisions the team hasn't made. I work alongside your product or engineering lead. We settle the direction together, and I turn it into a prototype your engineers can build from.
Endorsement
Hew's insights caused us to change engineering direction and product narrative.
Having experience working with product designers and design thinking over the last 15 years, Hew blew me away with the first-principles approach he took with understanding our product, use cases, customer experience vision, and the technical nuance and challenges that abounded in our solution space. Hew was a wonderful thought partner that thrived in ambiguity and only needed slight direction before having enough with which to work.
From an engineering perspective, we pivoted to a more integrated UI and backend design as a direct result of Hew calling out the need for better transparency, the need for easy evidence inspection, and making complexity accessible behind a simple UI. Additionally, Hew helped us see our product from a higher level to enable us to more clearly communicate how we solve customer needs in a delightful and unique way.
Hew was thoughtful, creative, inspiring, respectful, curious, and bold enough to challenge our thinking. Hew will be my first call when I need product design or product vision work in the future.
Engagement
You're buying a partner on the decisions that shape what gets built.
The working session comes first. A Direction Sprint or a Standing Engagement can start without a System Read. I scope the proposal once I understand the problem. I take longer engagements one at a time, and I do the work myself.
One week, scope fixed up front. This card is the scope, so there's no proposal. After the working session, we agree on a week. It starts on a Monday, once read-only repo and product access is in place. I deliver the written read and the prototype the following Monday.
Four weeks, scope fixed up front. Week one is a read-only pass through the codebase. Week two puts the first direction, or a working prototype, in front of the team.
Written direction is constant, in scheduled windows. Execution scales up when something needs building and back down when it doesn't, as often as the work requires. The price is set monthly, so scaling back lowers it. The engagement stays on the same agreement, and nobody re-explains the product.
Cash sets the floor. Above it, part of the fee can be equity where there's a 409A to value it against. Worth raising during scoping.
See what this looked like in practice.Endorsement
He was able to see the whole picture clearly and focus exactly on what would need his effort the most.
I really appreciated the collaborative approach Hew brought to our product team. Hew is thoughtful and receptive throughout the design review process, taking feedback well and helping create a productive environment for workshopping ideas and exploring different directions.
Hew was also willing to think beyond individual design questions and engage with broader product considerations, which gave the team another perspective as we worked through ideas and decisions. Hew always brought in additional expertise, research, and outside perspectives to help us think through potential approaches we wouldn't have considered otherwise.
A 30-minute working session. We work out what's going on, whether it's work I do, and where to start.
Whoever owns product decisions.
A read-only pass through the codebase, then the written read. For a System Read, this week is the whole engagement: the read, the decision named, and the prototype, delivered the following Monday.
Repo and product access, read-only, in place before the Monday it starts. Two or three conversations during the week.
For a Direction Sprint or a Standing Engagement: the first direction, or a working prototype, in front of the team.
For a Standing Engagement, your team's time, set in the monthly scope.
Start in the codebase.
End with a direction the team can run without me.
Most of the problem is already visible. Nobody has had time to draw it in one place.
Until it's named, every roadmap item sounds plausible. So each gets a sprint.
A person should know what to do and why, without someone from your team on the call. This is where design earns its place. It turns the decision into the spec.
AI changes what a person has to believe before they act. Trust has an anatomy: the evidence, the controls, the way back when it's wrong. I design that.
Decide how we'll know before we ship. Otherwise, whatever happens looks like it worked.
Priority is what matters most. Sequence is what makes the next release easier.
About View full work »
Eighteen years in product and design. Hew has built for Meta, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Opendoor, CNN, and Coca-Cola, some of it through Sapient.
At Pinterest he led design on an automated ad product that builds a campaign from a goal, a budget, and creative. More than thirty setup decisions collapsed into three inputs. It reached a $600M+ annual run rate at general availability and cleared its first-year target by 57 percent. At Meta, he set what got built first as the team brought Audience Manager's three versions, across four URLs, into one surface. Closer to seed, he did embedded product and design work across a Techstars Atlanta cohort.
Now he works with AI-native teams, where product, design, and engineering have become the same problem. Every engagement is with Hew, start to finish. No handoff to juniors. Product strategy comes first: what to build and why, worked out with whoever owns product and checked against how the codebase actually works. Then design engineering: he designs and prototypes against the real system, so the team knows what is hard and what only sounds hard before it commits.
Outside client work, he builds his own consumer products under Human Commons.
ForthcomingNotes and essays, when the work changes my mind.
See all writing Subscribe on SubstackLet's talk
Send a note or book the session. Both reach me.
Not a fit: teams still looking for the product, or a backlog that only needs more hands. If that's you, I'll tell you on the call and point you to someone better.
Atlanta, GA · Working worldwide
