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Alan Lindsay ConsultingEmail

Decide

Decide what to build

Discovery

Find out what is true before committing budget to building it.

The most expensive product mistakes are made before anyone writes code. A discovery engagement puts the missing research, customer conversations, and system diagnosis in front of the people making the call.

You get a written account of what is actually going on, the options it leaves open, and a recommendation you can act on or set aside.

Engagements are scoped as statements of work.

He took in a lot of information from me, the subject-matter expert, and mapped it into truly impactful product improvements.

Erik GrowRisk management specialist · Via The 41st Parameter and Experian

You might need this if…

  • A launch date is set and no one has tested the idea with a customer.
  • Leadership disagrees about the problem, not just the solution.
  • A system runs the business and no one fully understands it.

Selected examples

  • Circadence. Ran the market research a launch plan was missing. It showed the offering was a feature slice, not a full platform, and leadership halted the launch before it reached the market.

  • OneShare Health. Stepped into a legacy vendor platform no one fully understood, mapped the stakeholder and data-ownership gaps, and turned that diagnosis into a migration plan that secured the company’s data.

  • Experian. Ran the discovery behind a design system built for global reach: interviews and working sessions with brand, engineering, and product teams across regions to account for cultural uses of the brand, differing technology requirements, product-specific UI flows, and accessibility needs.

  • The 41st Parameter. Sat with the risk analysts who reviewed the transactions the platform flagged for human review, learned what they actually needed, and worked with them on rules to find the changes with the highest value for the outcome.

  • Patterson Homes. Worked with CEO James Patterson to understand a largely paper-based construction business, and used that understanding to shape the document processing pipeline that followed.

Roadmapping

A roadmap leadership agrees to and engineering can plan against.

A useful roadmap is a sequence of bets tied to real capacity, reviewed often enough to stay honest. I run the alignment sessions, turn the result into themes sequenced onto delivery cycles, and set the review cadence.

The roadmap is yours after delivery. It is set up so your team keeps it current.

Engagements are scoped as statements of work.

A vision that is both inspiring and realistic.

Chris FoisyStaff Product Designer · Via Experian

You might need this if…

  • The roadmap changes every time a new executive request arrives.
  • Engineering cannot tell which items on it are real commitments.
  • Every leader has a different top priority, and all of them are urgent.

Selected examples

  • OneShare Health. Ran bi-monthly roadmap reviews on a rolling three-cycle horizon, fed by stakeholder alignment voting, which brought competing leadership priorities into one achievable plan.

  • Circadence. Owned the product roadmap and facilitated its creation with the executive team, deciding which products and features would ship and how they would be delivered.

  • Experian. Owned the design system roadmap, planning releases and component priorities with teams worldwide, and set an annual design-community roadmap through the global design conference, with takeaways reported back and carried forward each year.

NextOrganizeSet up how the team works