Building Product on the Modern AI Tech-Stack

More Strategic Thinking; Less Project Management

When I think back at my years at Google, the thing that stands out is not the scale or the dizzying pace of growth, it was the clarity of thought and vision. Every meaningful product decision rested on a simple question: what problem are we really solving for the user, and can we solve it at scale?

That clarity helped shape my own philosophy as a business leader, and it was in that environment, under the pressure and privilege of building for billions, that I first met Emma. At the time, she was a product and engineering prodigy moving effortlessly across disciplines, while I wrested with the challenges of bringing new products to market. In those days, the customer conversations - about pain points, friction, intent, incentives, and the invisible architecture of user experience - formed the foundation of product development but we're only part of the overall product management process.

Product managers are obsessed with the nuance of decision-making, the messiness of real human workflows, and the challenge of designing systems that bend toward simplicity even as scale introduces complexity. Optimising the gap between how people want to work and how they actually work has been guiding my work throughout my career.

Years later, that same instinct led Emma to found Portia Labs, and in turn, Rezonant.

Initially, Emma co-founded Portia to speed up the journey to production ready agents, however, along the way, it surfaced something even greater. If you can automate decision-making at the workflow level, you can begin to automate the connective tissue of the company itself. The notes, the emails, the coordination, the nudges, the sequencing, the misalignments that metastasise into product delays. The invisible overhead that no product development tool captures but every team experiences.

That insight birthed Rezonant.

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Rezonant takes the insight and strategy of the product manager and applies it to the operational rhythm of the AI tech stack. It turns communication into clarity, clarity into alignment, and alignment into speed. It is built for a world where the classical model of product management - spreadsheets, roadmaps, meetings, and dependency diagrams - will not survive the next decade.

The truth is that AI has changed the physics of product development.

Product teams today lose an c.30-45% of their time not to engineering complexity but to organisational entropy. From disjointed Slack threads, to unclear ownership, shifting priorities and repeated in-person conversations - the manual work and mental burden of the product development process creates stress and delays. Whereas, AI-native companies are already shipping features 3-5x faster than their peers. They generate specifications in minutes, test prototypes automatically, synthesise user feedback in real time and update roadmaps with machine-level precision.

The future of product development is not about hiring more PMs. It is about using tools that reduce the cost of coordination to zero, enabling companies to ship products with velocity, and more quickly generate the flywheel of customer feedback.

I’ve spent much of my career in domains such as - banking, payments, financial regulation, accounting - where product clarity is not optional, it's critical. The cost of error is high. Across these industries, the problem is not the data but the decisions that lead to the cadence - more often than not too slowly - of delivering customer value.

Rezonant directly addresses this problem. It is being built as the product management to engineering orchestration layer for organisations that want capitalise on the AI tech-stack. The connective system that ensures ideas move cleanly from intention to execution without dying in a never ending backlog.

It's clear to me that Rezonant represents the next frontier of product management.

In this new world, product managers won’t disappear but the discipline will evolve. They will spend less time herding teams, reconciling documents, chasing updates, writing tickets and mediating ambiguity. Instead, they will operate like chief architects by shaping intent, defining problems, guiding judgment and ensuring that human creativity remains at the centre of the system.

The rest of the heavy lifting around communication, alignment, sequencing and synthesis will be automated by Rezonant.

It's liberating.

Rezonant is building the future of product engineering, and having worked in these roles across Google, Charlotte Tilbury and Stripe, Emma is well positioned to solve it.

It reminds me of the clarity of vision and speed of execution that Emma and I helped enable at Google. Yet, this time, the AI tech stack is pushing us all to go even faster and be even better.

What an incredible time to be building product!

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