Atlanta, Georgia · Open to Dir/VP Product roles

I find the markets
big companies skip.

Chemical Engineer, Georgia Tech 2010. Product leader who ships AI-powered software solo — from first line of code to production — for the markets nobody else is building for.

Work

What I ship.

Philosophy

What I believe.

01

Talk to the user before you write the spec.

Every product I've built started with watching someone struggle through their actual workflow — the shop floor, the family calendar, the Zigbee network falling over at 2am — not a survey or a feature request. Discovery isn't a phase before building. It's the thing that tells you what's actually worth building.

02

Ship before you're ready.

A rough v1 live beats a perfect v2 on a roadmap every time. Real usage surfaces problems no amount of planning reveals, and the fastest way to learn what a product needs is to put it in front of someone who needs it.

03

AI collapsed the distance between idea and evidence.

I used to write a spec, hand it to engineering, and wait weeks to find out if the idea was right. Now I can build the thing myself in a day and know by evening. That changes what product management even means when the person deciding what to build can also ship it.

04

Prioritization is the job, not a skill you bring to it.

Every list of what to build is really a list of what you're choosing not to build. I've killed more features than I've shipped, and the ones I killed are why the ones I shipped actually worked.

05

The best distribution is a solved problem.

If the product solves a specific, painful, real problem, the people who have that problem find each other and share it. That's the flywheel, and no amount of marketing spend replaces it.

Writing

Recent thinking.

Contact

Let's build
something.

Available for consulting on AI product development, niche market strategy, and technical architecture. Direct is best.

Michael Flanigan© 2026