Product Operator
I ship products at early-stage companies. 12 years. 4 industries. From zero to team, from spec to code. I close the gap between plan and delivery.
Sales taught me how customers think. Operations taught me how systems break. Product taught me what to build. Now I code—because the gap between spec and reality is where most products fail.
I've made every mistake: hired wrong, built the wrong features, optimized for the wrong metrics. That's how I learned to read signals. The operators who scale are the ones who close the gap between deciding and doing.
"I don't parachute in with frameworks. I do the work—and I build systems so sustainable that eventually I become replaceable. That's how you know you've built something real."
Most product leaders strategize. I also execute. Owned P&L, built teams, shipped across four industries. If you need someone who can both decide what to build and actually build it—let's talk.
Most companies die in the gap between plan and delivery. I close that gap by doing the work, not just directing it.
The gap between spec and reality is where most products fail. That's why I'm learning to code—not to replace engineers, but to think like one.
Patterns are historical—AI can spot them. Signals are emerging—require human judgment. The competitive advantage is interpreting what's coming, not what happened.
Pangea.ai · Product Lead
Transformed an Airtable-based marketplace into a scalable SaaS platform with one developer. Used AI prototyping to cut spec time by 75%. Achieved 60% efficiency gains at a fraction of typical development costs.
AlphaPipe (Acquired by Stout) · Managing Director, European Operations
Built European operations from zero. Hired and trained a 30-person team. Cut costs 60% while maintaining SOC 2 compliance and all client SLAs. Four years of building something that outlasted me.
Mireo · Business Unit Lead (P&L Owner)
Grew revenue 3.5x (€600K→€2.1M) by restructuring the business model. Identified a 12-month churn risk hidden in our pricing. Fixed it by changing contracts, not features. Seven years as P&L owner.
Nabr · Product Manager
Led the build of a Virtual 3D Tour system—programmatic, exact replicas of future homes. Every material, fixture, and finish placed perfectly. This product was instrumental in securing Nabr's seed round.
AI made engineering faster. But the bottleneck didn't disappear—it moved. Now the constraint is deciding what to build. Here's why Product Operators are the fastest-moving people in startups.
The mark of good operator work isn't being indispensable—it's becoming replaceable. Here's how to build systems that outlast you.
The gap between spec and reality is where most products fail. I'm learning to code not to replace engineers—but to close that gap.
I embed with teams as a product operator—whether that's a full-time role or fractional engagement. Either way, I'm in the trenches: talking to customers, writing specs, shipping features, and building the systems that let you scale. Based in Croatia, experienced with US time zones, and adaptable to your cadence.
I work best with early-stage teams (seed to Series A) where the gap between 'what to build' and 'who builds it' is most painful. If you're a founder doing product yourself, or you've got engineers waiting for someone to tell them what to build—that's exactly when I can help.
I treat the founder's vision as the starting signal, not the spec. My job is to turn that into something shippable — validate it with users, pressure-test the economics, and get it into production without creating a process layer that slows everything down. With technical founders, I handle the product and commercial side so they can stay in the code. With non-technical founders, I bridge the gap between what they want built and what engineering needs to build it. Either way, I'm not the PM who needs a 12-person team and a quarterly planning cycle to be useful.
Most PMs write specs and wait for engineering. I shape AND ship—whether full-time or fractional. I've done sales, ops, product, and now I'm learning to code. That cross-functional experience means I close the gap between deciding what to build and actually building it. I also build to leave: systems not dependencies.
Not by features shipped. I look at whether the product is actually moving the business — revenue impact, retention curves, unit economics. If we shipped 10 features and none of them changed user behavior, that's not progress. I track leading indicators early so we know whether something's working before we've spent six months on it. The goal is a product that makes money, not a roadmap that looks impressive.
The best product sense comes from building, not speccing. The gap between what you write in a spec and what's actually possible is where most products fail. Learning to code closes that gap. I'm not trying to replace engineers—I'm trying to think like one while I do product work.
I start with a focused diagnostic in the first 1-2 weeks: understand your customers, your tech, and where the gaps are. Then we align on priorities and I start shipping. No long ramp-up—I've done this across enough industries to read signals quickly.
I work remotely with seed to Series A startups. If you're building something and want to think it through, let's talk.