Product advisory · Mentoring · Speaking
Two weeks on one product. Your specs, your engineers, and a written recommendation you can act on.
Early in your product career? Book the same thirty minutes, no charge.
Work with me
Tell me what you’re deciding. Two sentences is plenty. If it’s not a fit I’ll say so on the call, and usually point you at someone who is.
For product teams
Two weeks, fixed fee, quoted up front
One engagement at a time.
Best for developer platforms, API products and infrastructure. Not code, and not a growth team.
Two sentences is plenty. Thirty minutes if you would rather talk, no charge either way, and you’ll leave with a straight read on the decision.
Early in your career
A decision you can’t call, a move you keep deferring, an offer you keep re-reading. You’ll leave with the call made and one thing to go and do.
No CV review theatre, and bring the actual fork. Students, early-career PMs and Product Soch members always welcome. Speaking and workshops start here too: a 35-minute talk or a half-day hands-on session on AI product management and eval design.
The record
Developers asked for more recipes. We wrote more recipes. The recipe they wanted already existed, and what was missing was the path between them, so I shipped against a symptom for a quarter.
Sixty conversations pointing one way read as evidence. They were a symptom. That is the mistake I now design against, and it is why every call below carries its outcome rather than its intention.
Each row names the year, the fork, and what it returned. Where the outcome is published, it’s linked; the rest is my account, marked as mine.
Decisions made at enterprise scale: as PM for PayPal, WorldPay, Verizon, Shell, Maxio and JuniperMist, including PayPal’s developer portal and the hundred thousand developers on it.
Left four months after the lending MVP shipped, to move from product ownership into product management.
What actually happened →CloseI’d taken a B2B lending platform to launch with two of Pakistan’s largest banks. It worked. Four months later I left.
A product owner is handed the what and is accountable for the how. That is a real job and I was good at it. It is also a ceiling, because the decisions that determine whether the thing should exist happen before the backlog does, and I wasn’t in those rooms. Moving into product management meant giving up being the person who reliably delivered and becoming the person who has to be right about what’s worth delivering.
Five years on it’s the call I’d make again, and the one I most often end up talking about with someone early in their career, because the owner-versus-manager distinction is rarely explained and it decides what you spend your twenties getting good at.
Held the roadmap for a quarter to wire up product analytics, then re-prioritised against what the funnel actually showed.
What actually happened →CloseEvery team has the list of things customers have asked for. Working the list is defensible, visible, and it feels like delivery. What it can’t tell you is which of those requests are symptoms.
So the roadmap waited a quarter while we instrumented the product and watched where people actually stalled. Adoption rose 30% once the roadmap was re-prioritised against the activation funnel rather than the request queue, and support tickets fell 20% as friction signals started routing into the backlog instead of into the inbox. Onboarding friction came down another 40%, working with UX.
These are APIMatic's own internal measures rather than published figures, so take them as my statement. The reason the call was hard isn’t the numbers: it’s that a quarter of visible delivery is a real price, and the case for paying it is an argument about what you can’t see yet.
Pushed llms.txt generation across every customer deployment of the developer portal. Six months of it.
What actually happened →Closellms.txt was a proposal, not a standard. No major lab had committed to reading it in production, and the honest case against building it was that we’d be shipping support for a file nobody consumed.
I argued the file was not the point. Writing a structured, accurate, machine-readable description of your own product is a discipline, and the teams that could do it would be ready for whatever format won. So we generated it automatically for every customer rather than making it a checkbox somebody had to find.
Fourteen months later, still no major lab has committed to reading llms.txt. Google has said publicly it doesn’t use it. The prediction I made in the essay at the time was that the format might not last while the discipline would, and that’s roughly where things sit. I count the call as right and the file as still unproven, which are two different things.
Built A[P]Iaudit outside work and published it free, open source, no signup. Source here.
What actually happened →CloseA diagnostic that scores an OpenAPI spec on how ready it is for AI agents, and names the specific gaps. The obvious move is to put it behind an email field: it’s exactly the kind of tool that generates qualified leads, and every competitor does that.
I gave it away instead, with the source, because a scoring tool you can’t inspect is an opinion with a number on it. If someone disagrees with a score they can read why it was given and tell me I’m wrong, which is the only way the rubric gets better. A gate would have bought a list of addresses and cost the thing that makes it worth using.
Community
I co-founded the Islamabad chapter of Product Soch in February 2022 and I’ve led it since that May. Three hundred people here, five thousand nationally.
The call that shaped it: no panels. A panel produces agreement and nothing else. Every session is hands-on, for people who ship. The most recent one, Product of Tomorrow, drew sixty registrations for an afternoon of building with AI tooling.
Do you build product in Islamabad? Then you’re already one of us. Just turn up.
Testimony
Verbatim from LinkedIn. A mentee, a manager of four years, and a colleague.
My go-to person for any career or PM-related advice. He makes himself available despite a very demanding schedule, gives unbiased opinions, and empowers me to make well-informed decisions.
Extremely responsible, hardworking and passionate sums up four years of Abdul Hannan's work under my direct supervision. Consistently high-quality results across solution consultancy, data migration, BI and agile business analysis.
He takes full responsibility, not only for the tasks at hand but for the big picture. Never shies away from learning something new and then practising it to perfection. Always willing to guide new team members.
Contact
A product fork, a career fork, a talk you need giving. Thirty minutes, no charge, and it’s useful either way.
