Senior Product Leader · Toronto
I'm a Senior Product Leader based in Toronto. I've shipped products in multiple industries including social media, healthcare, heavily regulated supply-chain software, food operations software, and D2C retail. The contexts look different, but the actual problems — user adoption, competitor pressure, regulatory fog, constant prioritization under uncertainty — show up time and time again. Once you've seen the pattern enough times, you can focus on the craft of good product strategy and delivery.
I've been building AI-powered products since 2023 — ML-curated content feeds at 500px, LLM-integrated decision tools, and ML Forecasting Models for enterprise food operators. I'm outcome-driven, not output-driven. Code is cheaper than ever. What you choose to build is the whole game. I do my best work on small teams with clear ownership, leadership that's still close to the work, and a bias toward shipping.
The point isn't just shipping. It's making someone's day less painful — for the user, and for the team building it.
Real products that shipped, with real teams.
Daily forecasts, tailored to every site – and honest about their own confidence.
Demand forecasting for Compass Group's North American kitchens. Machine-learning models train daily on each site's own sales history, so every location gets projections tailored to how it actually sells, and operators know what to prep tomorrow. I'm proudest of the trajectory: successive releases kept cutting the error rate – one by roughly 23% on core items – until an operator described the forecasts as "scary accurate."
— Senior PM at Compass Digital, 2024–2026.
→ Compass Digital's case study on the programMost of what I know I learned from other people in the tech scene. This is me trying to pay it forward. Notes on product, AI, leadership, and the parts of the work that don't fit neatly into a roadmap. New posts land on Substack.
The work didn't disappear. It just moved upstairs.
The best PM moves don't look heroic. They look like timing.
AI gives you retrieval infrastructure. Whiteboarding gives you encoded memory. They are not substitutes.
No digests, no roundups. New posts straight to your inbox.
Staying on the cutting edge isn't a posture — it's a habit. The fastest way I've found to actually understand a new tool or model is to build something with it. These are the things I'm tinkering on in my (admittedly limited) spare time, mostly to learn.
Keep strategy on course.
A work-in-progress experiment: an AI layer that connects to the tools a team already uses — meetings, Slack, planning docs — through their existing authentication and permissions, with their choice of AI model (Claude, ChatGPT, or others). It distills those conversations into a clear, structured record of what the team is trying to achieve and why. No new data silo, no vendor lock-in. When day-to-day decisions start drifting from that intent, Helm flags it.
Early prototype, source-available. Nights-and-weekends pace.
→ github.com/erikdohnberg/helmErik was a huge boon to the team in our transformation to an AI focus and helped all of us level up… Something that I appreciate about Erik’s work was how he established supporting docs, and sustainable approaches that allowed others to build off the work he led.