The fit

The product leader companies are looking for right now looks a lot like someone who has been doing this for twenty years.

01 — The market shift

AI is collapsing the coordination layer. One person now does what four did.

For most of the past decade, the PM–designer–engineer triangle was stable. PMs wrote specs. Designers made them usable. Engineers built them. The triangle had overhead — every handoff carried a translation tax — but it worked well enough that it became the default shape of a product team.

AI is disrupting that shape faster than org charts can adapt. Not because it replaces any of those roles, but because it collapses the cost of crossing between them. A single person who can think across strategy, design, and engineering — and who now has tools that close the gap between idea and working product — no longer needs a team to produce what used to require one.

If you’re leading a product team right now, the change is showing up in specific, disorienting ways. The design review that used to happen on Tuesdays is a PR comment thread that runs all week. The spec that used to go to an engineer goes to an agent — and writing a good brief for an agent turns out to require exactly the judgment that used to live in your most senior PM or designer. Your best ICs spend less time in Figma and more time writing strategy documents that agents will read. You’re asking whether to hire another product person, or whether one right person with the right tools can do what three used to do.

None of this is theoretical. It’s your Wednesday.

“The question that’s quietly become the most important one in your org: who writes the brief? Not who builds the thing — who has the judgment to direct what builds it?”

That person isn’t new. They’ve just always been rare. Now that the coordination overhead is gone, their value shows up in the numbers — in the speed, in the quality of the calls, in how much less gets lost between idea and shipped product.

02 — The real scarcity

A director doesn’t review each department’s work. They hold the whole film in one mind.

The film director analogy isn’t decoration. It describes something specific about what’s scarce and why.

A director is the only person on a production who holds the entire film simultaneously. The cinematographer is an expert in light. The composer is an expert in score. The editor is an expert in rhythm. Each of them does their work at a high level. The director isn’t necessarily better at any of those individual disciplines — but they’re the only one who can see how they interact. When the light is technically correct but emotionally wrong for the scene, the director catches it. Every department head needs direction that can only come from someone holding the whole.

That’s what’s genuinely scarce in product teams right now. Not AI capability in isolation, not design skill, not engineering depth — but the person who holds the whole picture simultaneously. When strategy, design, and engineering live in the same head, decisions don’t get made in sequence and handed off. They happen in parallel, informed by all three lenses at once.

“When something isn’t working, you don’t need three separate conversations to find it — you can feel where the system is wrong.”

What a director actually creates isn’t speed — it’s conditions. Direction precise enough that the designer isn’t guessing at intent. Decisions that hold, so the engineer isn’t filling in gaps. Problems caught at the seams between roles before they become expensive. The crew doesn’t just move faster. Each specialist finally gets to focus on what only they can do — and nothing they shouldn’t.

There’s a second dimension that matters more every quarter. A leader who already works across strategy, design, and engineering — and who uses AI as a production environment, not as an experiment — is also the person who can redesign how the team itself works. Which workflows belong to agents. Where human judgment stays in the loop. How evals get built so the system gets smarter every week instead of degrading every month. That kind of redesign can’t be hired in from the outside; it has to come from someone already inside the new way of working.

I’ve done the team-shape rebuild before, in a pre-AI era. Leading the eBuddy messaging platform through our partnership with Gree in Japan, I rebuilt our development process from a top-down model into a real agile cadence across teams in Amsterdam and Tokyo. Velocity went up 10×. Quality and predictability went up with it. Same instinct, different decade: see that the system’s shape is wrong for the work, change its shape.

03 — The red thread

The profile is rare. The instinct isn’t new.

The honest version of this argument is that you can’t fully verify it from a CV. But here’s what the record shows.

In 1999, I co-authored The Piranha Economy, a Dutch bestseller (Addison Wesley) about how internet technology was reshaping business. Then I went and tried to build it. I co-founded XOIP — Europe’s first unified messaging company, named the Netherlands’ #1 hottest startup, eventually sold to a European ISP. In 2003, inside that company, I prototyped a voice-driven GUI in a markup language almost no one remembers. There was no market for it and no job title for the person building it. I built it because I could imagine it. That has been the only reason I’ve ever built anything.

Then a hotel-group-booking auction marketplace for Chinese tour operators (Cerbex). Two-sided marketplace, novel pricing model, an industry I didn’t grow up in. Annual revenue went from €10k to €9M.

Then eBuddy. I led the pivot from a popular IM client into a multi-platform messaging app: 0 → 7M users, #1 in App Stores in several countries, three engineering teams plus design. The piece I’m proudest of is the process rebuild that came with the Gree partnership in Japan, where we shipped 10× faster without losing quality or predictability. Two startups co-founded, two exits. None of it by following a map.

“When the early ChatGPT API dropped, I didn’t read about it. I started building. That’s the only way I’ve ever understood a new technology — get your hands on it before the tooling arrives.”

The XOIP work today is where the instinct shows up most clearly. When AI started making our existing call-routing product obsolete, the move wasn’t to patch it. It was to recognise that an AI-native interaction needs a product designed from scratch, with a separate philosophy. That meant holding the strategic call, designing the new experience, and writing the production code. The featured case study is what that looks like in practice.

The profile companies are starting to describe — PM and designer and builder, overlapping — has been the only way I’ve known how to work for twenty years. AI didn’t create the instinct. It just ended the thirst.

04 — If this resonates

I’d like to hear about what you’re building.

If you’re building or rebuilding a product team for what’s coming — and you need someone who can lead it without losing the thread between strategy, design, and what actually ships — I’d like to talk.

The role I’m most useful in is Head of Product, or the first senior product hire on a team reshaping itself around AI. Not to replace what your team does — to give it sharper direction, more coherence, and a leader who has already lived inside the way of working you’re trying to build.