You can’t find the real problem.
A feature ask, workaround, or friction point is usually pointing at a deeper opportunity. I get close enough to find the real job that needs doing.
Director of Product, Airspace / San Francisco / 0→1 Products / Complex Operations
NEILHOLTWants to know.
I stay with a problem until the deeper pattern comes into view, then help people turn it into a real next chapter.
Finding the need
0 → 1 productsWhat looked like a simple feature request hid a potential new business. I brought the team around to building Fleet Manager, an Airspace platform now supporting five enterprise customers.
Proving the demand
Tens of millionsTwo of the largest medical-device manufacturers signed multi-year commitments on the strength of the Fleet Manager vision, before the product existed. We captured about 70% of forecast value while still in alpha and beta.
Scaling the platform
3.4× adoptionWeekly active users more than tripled in six months, once the project shifted focus from winning the B2B sale to ramping the people using the product every day.
Scaling the team
2 → 10 peopleI grew the product design and research team from two people to ten, and led the design and rollout of the AI-first process now running across our fifty-person R&D org.
01 / The thesis
Start with the thing no one has named yet.
There is usually a signal beneath the request: a tension in the workflow, a quiet workaround, an assumption that needs turning inside out. My job is to find it, give it a clear form, and bring the team with me to the insight.
The best work starts witha useful question.
Find the signal.
Get close to the real work, then notice the pattern that is hiding behind the request.
Give it shape.
Use a prototype, a chart, a story, or a system model to give the idea form people can point at.
Make it shared.
Turn the insight into a practical move the team, customer, or room can make together.
Then look again.
02 / Where I’m useful
Most helpful before the shape is finished.
I’m most helpful before a project has turned into a clean brief. I’m especially interested in early product bets, applied AI in real operations, and small teams finding shared direction.
A product can’t get traction.
It shipped, but usage is flat and the value isn’t landing. The job is to find why it isn’t sticking, and the smallest change that makes it click.
AI needs a real job to do.
The opportunity is promising, but the workflow, source of truth, and trust model are still fuzzy. Start with a real job and let the system prove its place.
The room needs a way to move together.
Product, design, research, customers, and leadership need a common artifact and a practical next step, not another abstract alignment meeting.
03 / Selected work
A few things that got more interesting once I asked the right question.
A selection of projects where my approach helped find the hidden insight and give shape to a new opportunity.
01 / New product · 0→1
Fleet Manager / Healthcare logistics
A feature request hiding a new business.
A customer’s “multistop” ask hid a deeper opportunity. I helped find it and translate it into a vision all of Airspace could get behind. A focused MVP won tens of millions in committed business in year one, and two years on it’s a validated platform for five of the industry’s largest medical-device makers.
Read the case study →
02 / Practice
Product Lab + Product Kit
Try more ideas. Keep the bar high.
AI makes code fast. Product Lab and Product Kit help our product team keep up, and elevate the best ideas from unexpected sources.
Read the case study →
03 / AI systems
AI Nodes / Product-Kit prototype
Don’t automate a mystery.
You can’t automate what you don’t understand. I helped our AI team win funding for an ambitious new approach to getting work done.
Read the case study →
Before Airspace
Where the pattern started.
Before they called me a product manager I was still doing the work: find the signal under the request, name the real job, and build the next piece that helps.
iAquaLink · Connected products · 2017–19
A complicated pool shouldn’t need a complicated app.
Read the case →AbelsonTaylor · Pharma sales UX · 2016–17
Rethinking the pharma rep visit.
Read the case →04 / Notes + experiments
Things I’m still working out.
A growing notebook of product questions, working artifacts, and experiments about how teams learn, where AI earns its place, and what makes an idea worth following.
If code gets cheap, what gets precious?
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I’m testing ways to find the gems hidden in the slop.
Read the note →They didn’t want a smarter dispatcher.
We brought our best dispatching technology to a new market. The operators had that part handled. What they couldn’t do was fill a thin week or move their prices.
Read the artifact →Selling complexity through simplicity.
When a system is too big to fit in a prototype, the challenge becomes creating a memorable story.
Read the note →Live experiment / Airspace Innovation Week / 2026
Relax, It’s Airspace.
Time-critical shipping is usually sold with urgent imagery that communicates its breakneck pace. This conference experience presents its opposite: once Airspace has a shipment, you can be calm.
Read what building it taught me →A calmer way to feel time-critical shipping.
Relax, It’s Airspace.Playing quietly
Relax, It's Airspace is ready to play quietly.
How it works
Every air shipment from one calendar day is presented in time around a spinning globe. Route lines in pleasing hues trace the travel; a generative ambient score marks starts, pickups, deliveries, and milestones, making the promise felt rather than explained.
05 / A little more human
ASOFT
SPOT.
For people. For dogs. For music. For the half-formed idea that needs a place to land.
No job title required
Serious about the work. Soft about the rest.
I make music, paint, surf, and carry a camera more than I need to. I love traveling the California coast with my wife, Tessa, or simply hanging out with our dogs, Ziggy and Chili. I’ll grow a bushy mustache if it can lift a Beatles cover set a few notches. Work can demand rigor, so it’s nice to let the creativity out unedited.
Listen / Green Wave ↗
An improvised modular synth piece, composed in my Noe Valley office-studio.
06 / Now
July 2026
I do my best work owning a product early.
Right now I’m deep in it at Airspace. I just rolled out a new R&D process across a fifty-person org. The work I keep reaching for is the early part of the challenge: the fuzzy signal, before anyone’s sure what the thing should become, when getting close to the customer can still change the answer.
I’m also circling a question I can’t put down: what helps an agent gain context without getting in the way, especially in complicated, real-world operations? How do you blend conversation and hard data without building something cumbersome, over-assumptive, or too timid?
That’s the work I say yes to, owning a product early, somewhere small enough that the first decisions still set the shape. If you’re building something like that, I’d like to hear what you’re trying to make clear.
Separately: I’m always after a circle of good collaborators in SF and people to trade half-formed ideas with. Lately I’ve been exploring Santa Cruz’s surf culture, a Sebastopol bonsai farm, and easing into the city’s meetups.
Surf.
Jam.
Good ideas.
Good people.