Five engagements, each run the same way: survey the ground honestly, chart a route that fits the real constraints, then build along it.
I mapped what existed: no shared framework, no established path to customer input, and a partner layer that blocked the usual routes to the people using the product.
I introduced a structured product framework and adapted it to fit a partner-led business specifically, rather than importing a process built for direct-sales companies. That included building a case for direct customer access, grounded in what the framework actually required rather than a general appeal to best practice.
I delivered the operating scaffolding the company didn't have: a working task structure, a communication map that clarified who decided what, and competitive intelligence across the fraud-detection landscape that sharpened how the product was positioned against alternatives.
A functioning product management process, running inside a business model that hadn't been built to support one.
An early user named Athena started running Feedmark across two separate organizations at once, not as a single freelancer managing one client relationship, but as someone coordinating review across multiple accounts.
That usage pattern was more informative than the original pitch. It pointed toward a different, sharper audience: small agencies and product consultants managing feedback across several clients at once, not solo freelancers managing one. The positioning shifted from “a client feedback tool” to something closer to async review infrastructure.
The repositioning is shaping what gets built next, including a package-level review feature suited to the agency workflow the real usage data pointed to.
Feedmark is in active development, built around what a real user actually did rather than what the original pitch assumed they'd do.
I worked through the problem space and the assumptions underneath it. The carbon market was the founder's interest. The person who would actually have to buy, install, and run the hardware was a farmer, and nothing in the plan reflected how farmers evaluate or purchase equipment.
I redrew the roadmap around that buyer. Making the hardware scalable meant understanding farm equipment purchasing behavior first, then designing backward from it.
The repositioned product gave the founder something fundable to present.
The founder secured funding and relocated to Alberta to work on Era Carbon full time.
I ran user interviews to find out which causes people actually care about and what moves someone from interest to giving. The findings became personas and journey maps covering both sides of the model, the sponsoring business and the person answering questions.
The handoff was the failure point. Solving it meant bringing the campaign onto the client's site instead of routing traffic away from it.
I designed a widget that embeds in the client's page, asks users the research questions in place, and closes by showing exactly where the donation goes.
A campaign format that satisfied the client's traffic concern and gave users a reason to finish.
I built a research plan and a persona to test against, wrote the discovery questions, and ran forty customer discovery calls.
Forty conversations produce a clearer read on demand than any amount of internal debate. The calls surfaced which buyers felt the anonymity problem sharply enough to pay for a solution, and which treated it as a preference rather than a requirement.
Alongside the research, I ran design reviews with the engineering side to keep what was being built aligned with what the discovery work was turning up.
A validated read on where the technology had a market, grounded in direct customer evidence.