Mike Hamilton · Fractional Head of Product · London & UK-wide
AI can build anything. Someone still has to decide what.
Get more from the product and engineering team you're already paying for.
AI has made building software faster. It hasn't made it easier to decide what to build, or to know whether the extra speed is turning into revenue. I help founders and investors make those decisions well, focus their teams on what matters, and turn AI into a measurable advantage in how they deliver.
Senior product leadership when you need it. AI-enabled delivery when you're ready to move faster.
- Twenty years in product
- Microsoft, SwiftKey, Adarga
- Products on hundreds of millions of devices
- Fixed, published prices
Sound familiar?
You’re spending more on development than ever, and the business numbers barely move.
The team ships. The release notes are long. Revenue, retention and the metrics you told investors about haven’t budged.
Everyone says AI will make the team faster. Nobody can tell you what they should do differently, or how you’d know.
Your engineers are using the tools. Whether that’s turning into anything you can measure is a different question.
Everything is a priority.
Customers, investors and your own team all want different things. Deciding what matters is getting harder, and the roadmap is getting longer.
You can’t tell whether the problem is the people, the technology, the plan or the decisions.
You’re too close to see it clearly, and everyone you could ask has a stake in the answer.
If AI writes the code, why do you need a product lead?
Because building just got faster, and deciding what to build didn't. AI builds whatever the spec says, so a vague spec gets you the wrong product faster than ever.
Product judgement, and specs good enough for engineers and AI tools to build from, are now the scarce part. That's what I do, and I've built the pipeline that makes it work: specs through human review gates, then coding agents, then more shipped per week without quality slipping.
AI makes building software faster. I make sure that means something for your business.
Which of these is you?
I need product leadership
Founders and CEOs
You're still the product team and the roadmap has outgrown you. Senior judgement one or two days a week, without the full-time salary.
I want AI to actually speed us up
CTOs and engineering leaders
The agents are fast; the specs and the product decisions aren't keeping up. A way of working that turns the speed into shipped outcomes.
I need an independent read
Investors and boards
Ten-day product due diligence from £10,000, written for an investment committee, and sprints to fix what it finds.
How it works
Start free. Pay for my time only when it's worth it. The review is credited in full against a sprint, and half a sprint against your first fractional month, so nothing is wasted if we carry on. Prices exclude VAT.
Step 1
Free assessment
Find out where you stand
Free
Ten questions, an instant score. Share your roadmap too if you like, and I’ll send a personalised analysis within two working days.
- Start here
Step 2
Personal review
Get my read on your roadmap
£195 + VAT
Send me your roadmap or strategy and your answers. Within three working days you get my written review: what to keep, what to cut, what to fix first. Credited in full against a sprint; refunded if it tells you nothing new.
Step 3
Sprint
Fix the thing that’s costing you most
From £8,000
Roadmap Reset from £8,000 to get the team focused on what matters. AI Delivery Setup from £15,000 to make AI work for your software team. Product Due Diligence from £10,000 for investors.
Step 4
Fractional Head of Product
Keep the team performing
From £5,000/month
One or two days a week, embedded with your team, for as long as it’s useful. Half a sprint credited against the first month.
Twenty years of this
VP Product at Adarga and Head of Product at Factmata, so I've been building AI products since 2018. CPO at Play Consulting. Before that, Microsoft and SwiftKey, where the keyboard I worked on ran on hundreds of millions of devices and I picked up a patent. I started as a C++ engineer and still read the code, which is not the same as writing it for your team. It means I can tell you when a build is bigger than the business needs, and say the same to the engineers in terms they'll accept.
I like this work most when the team argues with me and we get somewhere better than where either of us started.
Recent work through Hatstep: Fairground, ListAid (a new venture for PE group Valsoft) and MoneyPlus. See the work.
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck. Tell me what’s going on and I’ll tell you whether I can help.
Taking on one new client from November 2026.