Dean Fankhauser

I build digital products. I have been doing it for about sixteen years, in two fairly different modes.

The first decade I contracted in London. Google, LVMH, Jaguar Land Rover, Santander, Xapo, and a run of agencies before those. You get dropped into someone else's organisation, with their constraints and their stakeholders, and you have to be useful quickly. It teaches you to find the real decision fast, because nobody is giving you a long ramp.

Since then I have been running product on things I helped start: a marketplace called Nuji that Klarna acquired in 2020, and after that Movingto, Bitcompare and Robozaps. That is a different discipline. Nobody hands you the brief, the budget is your own, and you find out quickly which of your opinions were correct.

I am unusual among product leads in that I still design. Wireframes, flows, design systems, prototypes. I would rather work in the file than describe what I mean and hope it survives translation. It makes me faster with engineers and much harder to mislead about what is actually difficult to build.

I am based in Sydney and available for senior product contracts. The work I want is the ambiguous kind: a product that is not working where nobody agrees why, or a decision that has been deferred three quarters running.