Building has never been cheaper. Deciding what to build has never mattered more.
I help software companies work out what they are actually selling, to whom, and why it wins — and then build the product function that delivers it.
The problem
The bottleneck moved, and most teams have not caught up
For thirty years, engineering capacity was the constraint on software. It was also, accidentally, a quality filter. When building a feature cost six engineer-months, somebody had to make a case for it. Bad ideas died in the estimate.
That filter is gone. The cost of building has collapsed; the cost of being right about what to build has not moved at all. So teams ship more, faster, and a growing share of it lands on nothing — not because anyone was careless, but because the discipline that used to be enforced by scarcity now has to be chosen deliberately.
This is structural, and it is happening to good teams everywhere. If you have shipped something quickly that is not finding its market, the problem is almost never the engineering.
I use these tools aggressively myself. The difference is not whether you use AI — it is whether anyone decided what to point it at.
What I do
Four ways to work together
I am driven by solving people's problems with technology, and by scaling business success through people. If you are starting out, the work is getting the problem and the path to market right; if you already have a product, it is the strategy and process to scale it — and I enjoy both.
Positioning
Positioning & Proposition
2–4 weeks · fixed scope
What the product does, the problem it solves, who the user is and who the buyer is, where it fits in a real workflow, what it is up against, and an honest verdict on whether it is feasible — validating the idea before you spend on design and build. The answer most teams assume they already have.
Sprints
Discovery & Strategy Sprints
4–8 weeks
Market entry, customer discovery, a roadmap reset, partner and channel strategy, or pricing and packaging architecture. Scoped to a decision you are stuck on rather than to a number of days.
Leadership
Fractional & Interim Product Leadership
1–3 days per week · ongoing
Head of Product, part-time or covering a gap — and building the product function so it outlasts the engagement. The goal is to make the role unnecessary.
Diligence
Product & Technical Due Diligence
Days to weeks
Buy-side or sell-side product assessment, board advisory, and assessment of product leadership candidates. What the product really is, how defensible it is, and what the integration will actually cost.
Recent work
A sample of engagements
Client names are kept confidential as a matter of course.
A Chilean mine optimisation group
Technology assessment · Strategic options · Go-to-market
Assessment of the group's technology, advice and planning across its strategic options for diversification, and the go-to-market approach to take it forward.
An Australian regenerative agriculture company
Technology strategy · Competitive assessment · Fractional product leadership
Translating the founder's vision into a technology strategy and an execution plan, alongside a competitive assessment and ongoing fractional product leadership.
Background
Twenty years of deciding what gets built
I have led product at Gemcom, at Dassault Systèmes in the GEOVIA brand, and most recently as Head of Product Management at Deswik — building software for mine planning engineers, a group with strong opinions and no patience for products that do not match how the work is really done. Two of those chapters ended in acquisition, and I was the product leader through both.
It is a demanding place to learn this craft, and the discipline transfers. The domain is always learnable; deciding what a product is for is the part that does not change.
- Nearly two decades of senior product leadership in technical B2B software
- Product leadership through acquisitions by Dassault Systèmes and by Sandvik
- Geology and information technology, University of Queensland
Tell me what you are trying to decide.
The first conversation is free and usually settles whether there is anything here worth paying for. If there isn't, I will say so.
Justin MeadeMeade Advisory