I am a fractional Chief Product Officer. Every engagement starts the same way: six weeks, four days a week, before you commit a year and a budget to building the wrong thing. Some of them carry on from there.
Every company I have worked in already had the information it needed. Not once did I turn up with a fact nobody had.
What was missing was the right name for the facts they already had. And a name is not a detail.
What the read costs, against what it protects
Swipe the figure sideways
A name decides what you do next.
He has supported and contributed to all facets of our business: product development, marketing, branding, OKRs, business transformation, and people operations, along with managing and mentoring leaders in our organization. It is impressive how much Miles can help you across your entire organization.Rogayeh Tabrizi, PhD · Founder and CEO, Theory+Practice · 2024
Instrumental to helping us think more clearly and objectively, not only about our product roadmap but our business as a whole. High empathy for founder vision, but at the same time a pragmatist about what it takes to get products to market.Ali Davar · Chief Legal Officer, Owl.co · 2020
A talent for managing board conversations and securing support at the senior leadership level. He consistently builds bridges within organizations that struggle with sprawl and siloed thinking.Mya McDuffie · Director of Product Insights, Campminder · 2025
All of them mine. The first one is the reason there are six more.
It arrives already named. And it is the document that decides what gets funded, who gets hired, and what the next year is about.
Six times a company has hired me, and six times the brief described something next to what was actually wrong. Not through carelessness. A brief describes the symptom, because the symptom is the part you can feel.
I am aware of how that sounds. A man whose living depends on you having misnamed something will tend to find that you have. So the work is built to end: six weeks, a fixed price, and a handover to your own people.
It is not the problem. It is the first thing to check.
If your brief is right, the fastest thing I can do is tell you so and leave.
Churn belonged to the support team. A number on a dashboard, in a row of other numbers, for about a year.
It was the ceiling on the entire company.
It was on the list of things to shut down. Almost no sales in ten months.
A thing you cannot sell alone can still be the reason two other things work. It became the brain, not the product.
Get new people to create a project. Every onboarding in the industry said so, including the one we had built.
Each new project made someone far less likely to pay. Creating project after project is not using a tool. It is shopping.
Hiring one meant a salary most of our customers could never afford.
Unless it is not a salary. Then it is a feature, and the people who were priced out have one.
A number we planned against, and held people to.
It is an output. You cannot forecast a number that gets set at the point of sale by somebody else.
A one-year curriculum. Students arrived, learned, left with a portfolio and hoped.
It was already producing founders. An agency built by four graduates. The chief executive of a company I would later work for. A studio doing work for every tech brand you can name.
All of that happened before I got there, which is exactly why I believed it could be built on purpose rather than left to luck.
It was not a curriculum. It was a career incubator that nobody had named, so nobody had engineered it. The teaching is the means. The outcome is the product.
I do not bring new facts.
I change what the facts are called.
And then the decision changes by itself, which is the part that makes it stick. Nobody has to be persuaded of anything. They look at the same thing under a different name and cannot un-see it.
You cannot tell someone their heading is wrong. Try it and watch them defend the heading, harder and for longer than they would defend the facts.
So I don't. I ask the question that gets them there. Then the new name is theirs. They argue for it in meetings I am not in. They are still using it after I have gone.
"He loves asking you difficult questions that force deep thought, but will make sure you feel empowered in solving them."
I am not going to tell you often. You will find out what I think of you from what I hand you. Two other people who wrote things like that in 2010 and 2018 now run design at Asana and carry an SVP of Product title.
I incubated ideas that grew revenue and people who grew careers, and only one of those shows up in a P&L.
A confession about the kind of mess I like.
I went over to Vancouver recently with nowhere to stay and no ferry home on the schedule. I found a route. I enjoyed it considerably more than the situation warranted.
My wife pointed out that this is also what I do for a living, and she is right. Hand me a constraint and tell me to solve it and I am completely happy.
The distinction I have only just learned to make: I love it when the constraint is a system. I love it much less when the constraint is people who are frightened.
Same skill. Entirely different cost.
Both assume the business is basically well. If it is on fire, I am not the first call, and I will tell you who is. There is one engagement behind both of them, and it is the same six weeks either way.
A platform bet, an acquisition, a new market. Funded, scheduled, and nobody around the table is arguing. Unanimity before a large irreversible decision is not usually agreement. It is usually that everyone is tired of the question.
I come in for six weeks, four days a week, with product, design and the commercial side as one job, and we find out whether the thing you are about to build is the thing you need.
A raise, a sale, a new owner. Your product and engineering story is about to be read by people whose job is to find the hole in it, and they will score you against benchmarks you may not have seen.
I have built that scorecard for my own companies. I would rather run it on you before someone else does.
There is one question I will ask you first, and it is not a test:
What are you about to build, and who inside the company thinks it is a mistake?
There is no wrong answer. If the answer is nobody, that is the most useful thing either of us will learn in the first ten minutes.