Throughout my career I’ve operated at the intersection of strategy and execution in consumer-tech — from $1B+ ecommerce platforms to zero-to-one product builds inside Fortune 500 companies. The discipline of knowing where to play and how to win has shaped every engagement.
When execution was slow and expensive, a wrong direction was self-correcting — the friction bought time to course-correct. AI has removed that friction. Teams can now sprint in the wrong direction at a speed that used to be impossible. The risk for companies now is not that they can’t build — it’s that they haven’t answered the prior question: where should we play, and how will we actually win there?
Roger Martin’s Playing to Win framework has been foundational to how I think about strategy — not as a planning document, but as an integrated set of choices that position a company to win. In an AI-accelerated environment, the discipline of making those choices explicitly is more valuable than it’s ever been.
Most teams declare victory at product-market fit and move to scale. But Brian Balfour’s Four Fits framework identifies four that have to hold simultaneously — how well your product fits the market, how the product fits your acquisition channels, how those channels fit your business model, and how the model fits the market you’re actually in. Each one influences the others, and as a company scales, any one of them can quietly break.
When that happens, symptoms surface — slowing growth, rising churn, channels that used to work and suddenly don’t. The root cause isn’t always obvious. I’ve worked through this repeatedly: in an edtech SaaS business where the growth loops looked healthy until the channel-to-model economics didn’t compound; inside a B2B proptech startup where genuine product-market fit was undermined by an inverted business model. Recognizing the misalignment and rebuilding the strategy around it was the move that mattered each time.
Beyond instinct, diagnosing which fit is broken — and what has to change as a result — has become a discipline I apply deliberately.
When I joined Toys“R”Us, mobile commerce was underinvested relative to its potential — a significant channel being treated as secondary. I built and scaled it from $100M to ~$450M over four years, with 44X ROI on the platform migration in year one. That track record was the basis for a role I proposed: VP of Digital Product, taking ownership of the full digital portfolio across product, experience, and strategy.
Already close to the work, I stepped into expanded accountability at a critical moment: a digital replatform that had missed two launch targets, was over budget, and had become a major blocker on the technology roadmap. The strategy was sound — the execution model wasn’t aligned to it. I championed a complete rearchitecture and redesign of the site experience, rebuilt the delivery approach, and launched across all digital properties in five months.
Equinox had the kind of problem most companies would want: a dominant brand, a loyal customer base, and a mandate to find the next billion-dollar opportunity before the market defined it for them. I was brought in specifically to answer that question.
What made the engagement substantive wasn’t narrowing 100+ concepts down to one. It was that the winning idea — a personalized AI-driven performance habit platform, starting with the $100B sleep enhancement market — wasn’t on the original list at all. Getting there required applying the discipline of where to play and how to win rigorously, across a fragmented innovation portfolio, to produce a single bet the business could actually fund and build behind.
The concept secured unanimous CEO support, ~$5M in funding, and approval to build a 50-person team spanning product, design, and engineering. The project was halted by COVID — not by the strategy.
Host was a CBRE-incubated B2B SaaS startup — employee productivity and property tech — with dozens of engineers, no product organization, and a genuine path to enterprise customers through CBRE’s existing relationships. The challenge wasn’t access. It was fit: the original business model asked enterprise clients to pay directly for a product that competed with how CBRE’s core business already created value for them.
I was brought in as global head of product to define the product vision and strategy from first principles, establish north star metrics, and pivot the roadmap to what reference customers actually needed. The model pivot I recommended — offering Host as a loss leader to support broader contract renewals — reframed the product’s value to the parent business and unlocked nine-figure ARR impact for CBRE.
Nike signed as a marquee global customer during my tenure. EY followed shortly after — built on the same strategic and product foundation.
What I bring to a board is a specific and increasingly rare capability: the ability to evaluate a CEO’s product strategy from the inside — not just whether the numbers work, but whether the product thinking behind them is sound. It tends to matter most when the most consequential item on the agenda has a product bet at its core.
I’ve operated at every stage a consumer-tech company goes through. Founder-adjacent growth at a company that scaled 4,000% over a decade. Enterprise transformation at a $13B+ global retailer. Zero-to-one builds inside large organizations. And now connected hardware with a direct-to-consumer subscription model on top. I can look at a company’s product roadmap and ask the questions a board needs answered: what is the winning aspiration, where exactly are we choosing to play, how will we actually win there, and are the capabilities and resources aligned to those choices?
I build digital product strategy and drive it to results. The companies I work best with have the brand, the ambition, and are committed to winning — but need someone who can build the product capability to actually get there.
I’ve served as VP of Product and CPO-equivalent at companies ranging from $13B+ global retailers to PE-backed and publicly traded enterprises to venture-backed startups — always at the inflection point where the existing strategy had stopped working and a new one needed to be built without stopping the business.
What’s shaped my approach across all of it is a belief that strategy and execution are not sequential — they’re concurrent. Getting the strategic choices right matters: where to play, how to win, what the business model needs to support. But so does the quality of execution and the product instinct that determines how those choices actually show up for users. I’ve seen companies move confidently in the wrong direction, and I’ve seen the right direction executed poorly enough to produce the same outcome. Most of my career has been spent at the moment those two risks converge.
Today I serve as VP of Digital Product & UX at Halo, where I own product strategy and execution across the companion app and ecommerce ecosystem for a connected pet safety platform — with direct accountability for subscription growth, retention, and LTV. I’m selectively available for board and company advisory roles with consumer-tech and DTC companies navigating product-led growth.
I’m open to board and company advisory conversations with consumer-tech and DTC companies. The best fits are typically at growth stage transitions or significant platform bets where product strategy is a board-level question.