Early product bets
Before the brief is clean.
Find the real opportunity while the first decisions can still change everything after them.
About / Neil Holt
San Francisco, CA
I go where the work is.
I’m a product leader in San Francisco and Director of Product at Airspace. For more than a decade, I’ve had the same job under different titles: find the real problem inside a complicated operation, give it a form people can understand, and build the path that moves a team forward.
01 / The throughline
The work is always the same shape.
Somebody asks for a feature. Beneath the request there is usually a workaround they’ve stopped noticing, a tension between teams, or an assumption nobody has turned over in years. The request is real. It’s just rarely the problem.
I stay with it until the pattern comes into view, then make something people can point at: a prototype, a model, a story, or the beginning of a product. Reaching the answer is often faster than getting a room to believe it. And an answer nobody believes doesn’t ship.
02 / The route here
How I got here.
The path here started sideways. I studied zoology and journalism, an odd pair, but both halves stuck: get to the right answer through process, then tell people about it in a way they’ll actually understand. That’s still the job.
From there, research and design: learning to watch people work and notice the problems they had stopped complaining about.
AbelsonTaylor / PharmaAt AbelsonTaylor, that meant rethinking pharmaceutical sales tools built for fifty-page presentations when the real conversation lasted two minutes.
iAquaLink / Connected productsAt iAquaLink, it meant breaking an intricate connected-pool system into pieces small enough to ship and learn from.
Airspace / LogisticsAt Airspace, a customer’s request for multistop routing revealed the opportunity that became Fleet Manager.
Along the way, I grew our product design and research practice from two people to ten and helped build the AI-first R&D process now used across the organization. Product work that only I can do isn’t worth much; the judgment has to travel.
03 / Now
What I’m doing now.
I’m still at Airspace and still happiest in the fuzzy early part of a problem, when getting close to the customer can change the answer.
I’m also circling a question I can’t put down: what helps an agent gain real context without getting in the way? There’s a fuller version on the homepage.
04 / Where I’m useful
Most helpful before the shape is finished.
Applied AI
When AI needs a real job.
Start with the workflow, source of truth, and trust model, not the technology alone.
Shared direction
When the room needs to move.
Give customers, product, design, research, and leadership one practical artifact to point at.
05 / No job title required
The rest of it.
I surf, play in a band, paint, and carry a camera more than I need to. I’ll grow an unreasonable mustache for a Beatles set. My wife and our dogs get the best hours.
Lately I’ve been learning Santa Cruz’s surf culture and looking for more people in San Francisco with whom to trade half-formed ideas.
Listen / Green Wave ↗