Services

When a product accumulates features faster than structure, every new decision gets harder: who a screen is for, what a role can do, where a workflow starts and ends. I map the system underneath the product — the users, the permissions, the states, the handoffs — and restructure it so the product can keep growing without splintering into special cases.

This is the core of the practice. It usually produces an access or permission model, a product schema, and the architecture the team designs and builds against.

For teams that need a product organization before they can afford one. I take responsibility for the product end to end: strategy, the roadmap's shape, the design system, and the decisions in between. I served as Fractional CPO at Doorpass from January 2025 through June 2026, where the work ran from a two-day founding workshop through a live iOS app and doorpass.ai.

This works best when the founder owns the vision and needs someone to own the product's coherence.

Some products don't have a feature problem; they have a findability problem. The value is real but the structure hides it, and the path from interest to action isn't clear enough. I audit the existing experience, restructure the information architecture, and define the sequence that moves a visitor from arrival to the thing they came to do.

Cheap intelligence changes which products and workflows are worth building. I help teams work out what that means for their system: where AI belongs in the workflow, what it should never quietly own, and what becomes buildable that wasn't before. I also build in this space myself, so the advice comes from shipping, not from slideware.

I write about this shift in an ongoing essay series on AI as a coordination technology.

Most engagements open with structured discovery: two-hour working sessions with the people who know the domain, mapped all the way down from goals to the questions users are trying to answer. The method — Product Schema Mapping — is documented in Before the First Screen. What comes out is a product schema — the shape of the problem the product must serve — and from there the work moves into architecture, design, and build.

Engagements run from a two-day workshop to fractional leadership over years. The archive of past work is on the Work page, and the thinking behind the AI-era work is in the essays.

If your product has grown harder to understand than it was to build, get in touch.

Email drew@drewlittrell.com