I'm Jacob, a product manager based in Auckland, New Zealand. I've been working in and around digital since before it had a playbook, and I've managed to stay hands-on throughout.
My background spans graphic design, IT support, agency production, digital marketing, and now product ownership at scale. What that means in practice is that I can sit in a discovery session with a customer, take the findings into a backlog refinement with engineering, and then write the App Store release notes, all in the same week, without dropping any of the threads.
As a Product Manager at a global security systems company, I've owned a portfolio of 8-10 products that simultaneously span firmware, mobile apps, APIs, and web portals. Before that I built SolarCity's website and lead generators from scratch, led digital production at Salt Interactive, and ran digital strategy at 42Below, where in 2009 I produced what was likely one of New Zealand's first augmented reality brand activations, before AR was a product category with established tools or agencies.
More recently I've been building AI-augmented workflows using n8n, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, Figma Make, Ollama, and Qwen, and integrating AI models at API level across Google Analytics, Firebase, App Store Connect, Salesforce, and Zendesk. I watch AI content for fun. I've developed a real understanding of both what agentic AI can do in production and where it currently falls short.
I tend to get brought in when things are complicated. Multiple stakeholder groups with conflicting priorities, cross-functional delivery with no single owner, a product portfolio that's grown faster than the process around it. I'm pretty comfortable in that kind of ambiguity.
I've run customer and integrator discovery programmes that directly shaped roadmap priorities. I've managed go-to-market across App Store submissions, training content, and post-release support coordination. I've led hardware EOL evaluations across technical, commercial, and integration criteria. I've taken ownership of unmanaged web product portfolios, built the business case for remediation, and shipped the fixes.
One thing I think I'm genuinely good at is working across different team sizes and structures. I've worked with teams as small as a single developer, and as large as multi-squad programmes working towards one shared goal. The way I work changes depending on the context - what doesn't change is that I give developers the full picture. I tell them what we're building and why, and they decide how.
I've done PRINCE2 Agile training, which I find useful less as a strict methodology and more as a shared vocabulary for having honest conversations about scope, risk, and delivery pace.
I'm pragmatic about tools. I'll use whatever gets the thing done, and I'll build the automation or the workflow if the right tool doesn't exist yet.
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2020
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From 2016 to 2018 I was treasurer and a foster home for the Lonely Miaow Association, an Auckland cat rescue charity. Over two years my household fostered and rehomed around fifty stray and abandoned cats and kittens. We somehow kept only four.
Outside of work I'm an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO), maker, tinkerer, and Minecrafter. I'm interested in the overlap between physical and digital making, which probably explains why the 42Below AR project still sticks with me all these years later.
I'm based in Avondale, Auckland, New Zealand.