Independent product, platform & service leader

Complicated digital work, made workable.

I help organisations shape, improve and recover the platforms and services that sit between customer experience, technology and day-to-day operations.

Bring me a problem See the work

Experience across enterprise commerce, SaaS and customer-facing platforms.

20+years in digital products, services and delivery

170+retailers supported on enterprise SaaS platforms

60+specialists in a distributed capability I led

c.15%uplift across a £20m+ revenue channel

01 / What I do

Make the whole service easier to understand and improve.

The useful answer is rarely contained inside one backlog, team or system. I follow the service end to end, find the decisions that matter and help the right people move them forward.

Russ Watson-Thomas

Direct, senior involvement

I work directly with the people responsible for making the service work.

That means moving comfortably between strategy, delivery, technology and operations as the problem requires.

The aim is practical progress, not an impressive document that everyone politely admires and then forgets.

Read my CV

The canonical V6 career profile, styled for the site and generated from version-controlled Markdown.

Hear about what I’m messing about with

Products, frameworks and experiments currently being built, tested or argued with.

Shape direction

Turn an opportunity, problem or platform ambition into a practical direction with visible trade-offs.

Product and platform strategy
Discovery and problem framing
Capability and roadmap design
Solution options and sequencing

Recover delivery

Identify what is actually blocking progress, reset priorities and rebuild a dependable route to outcomes.

Delivery and platform health checks
Backlog and governance reset
Risk and dependency management
Supplier and stakeholder alignment

Lead through change

Provide hands-on senior ownership while a service, operating model or organisation is evolving.

Fractional platform leadership
Service and operational improvement
Capability and team development
Independent assurance and challenge

02 / Selected work

The useful work starts when the neat version of the problem stops being true.

These four examples cover the situations where I tend to be most useful: priority and ownership problems, journeys split across teams, simple interactions hiding complicated ecosystems, and launches that need to become services. Client and programme details remain appropriately discreet.

Platform recoveryAssisted selling

The platform did not have 86 priorities. It had no shared decision about what mattered.

An in-store ordering service had become the place where every request, dependency and unresolved argument went to wait. I rebuilt the backlog around customer, colleague and operational outcomes, then brought the teams and suppliers together around four deliverables they could genuinely steer. The work stopped being a queue and became a platform again.

86 → 4Competing items reduced to four shared priorities on a service handling around £1m each month.

Commercial improvementCustomer journey

The revenue problem was not sitting neatly inside the conversion funnel.

The obvious move was to keep tuning individual screens. The useful move was to follow the journey through platform behaviour, customer friction and the operational process behind it. I connected analytics, experimentation, product and operations around the same service, helping deliver around 15% growth across a channel worth more than £20m.

c.15%Uplift after the journey was treated as a connected service, not a collection of conversion tweaks.

Platform orchestrationDigital loyalty

Made several companies and systems disappear behind two taps.

The customer should not have needed to understand Apple Wallet, payment terminals, identity services, security rules, mobile code or supplier boundaries. I coordinated product, security, mobile, point-of-sale, hardware and partner teams through the technical and governance work needed to make them behave like one service.

Two tapsA simple in-store interaction delivered across Apple, payment hardware and multiple suppliers.

Product launchMobile platform

A mobile app is not finished when it reaches the App Store.

The launch mattered, but the harder job was making the product operable once the project machinery moved on. I worked across the mobile supplier, internal teams and dependent platforms to establish release readiness, ownership, support and an ongoing route for change. It became a live service the organisation could keep evolving, not simply a successful launch date.

Launch to serviceA flagship customer app with the ownership and operating rhythm needed to keep evolving after go-live.

03 / Ways to work

Start with the amount of help the problem actually needs.

Each price reflects the focused senior time normally required, including preparation, working sessions, analysis and agreed outputs. The exact shape depends on the problem, but the likely time commitment should never be a surprise.

Advisory

Independent review, challenge or decision support for a specific issue.

What this includes

Best suited to a defined question, decision or piece of work that needs an experienced outside view. This may include light preparation beforehand and a short written follow-up where useful.

See an example engagement and cost

£175 / hourOne focused session, up to two hours.

Rapid diagnostic

A concentrated assessment with findings, risks and prioritised next actions.

What this includes

A compact review of a clearly defined problem. Time is normally split between reviewing the available evidence, speaking to the right people, analysing what is getting in the way and presenting a concise set of findings and next actions.

See an example engagement and cost

From £2,250Typically three days across one to two weeks.

Health check

A structured review of platform direction, ownership, delivery and operational health.

What this includes

A broader assessment of how a platform, service or delivery environment is working. This will normally include evidence review, stakeholder conversations, an assessment of the main strengths and risks, and a written playback with practical recommendations.

See an example engagement and cost

From £3,500Typically five days across two to three weeks.

Discovery sprint

Turn an uncertain opportunity into a recommended direction and delivery plan.

What this includes

Designed for work that still needs proper investigation before decisions harden around it. Time is usually spread across research, stakeholder sessions, problem framing, option development and the creation of a recommended direction with a credible delivery plan.

See an example engagement and cost

From £6,750Typically nine days across three to four weeks.

Delivery recovery

A focused intervention to stabilise ownership, priorities and delivery.

What this includes

Hands-on support for a platform, programme or service that has stalled, become difficult to govern or lost a dependable route forward. The engagement normally combines leadership, priority and backlog reset, dependency management, stakeholder alignment and the creation of a practical recovery plan.

The work is scheduled around the moments where senior intervention is most useful rather than filling a calendar for decorative purposes.

See an example engagement and cost

From £13,000Typically around 17 days across four weeks.

Fractional leadership

Reserved senior product, platform or delivery support across the month.

What this includes

Ongoing access to senior support without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire. Capacity may be used for working sessions, stakeholder meetings, reviews, decision support, supplier challenge and agreed deliverables.

The days can be spread across the month or grouped around important decisions and delivery moments. Additional capacity is priced separately.

See an example engagement and cost

From £3,000 / monthFrom four reserved days, scheduled around agreed priorities.

Embedded leadership

Sustained senior ownership inside the organisation.

What this includes

For work requiring deeper day-to-day involvement, team leadership or programme ownership. The expected number of days, responsibilities and duration are agreed up front, with longer and more predictable engagements priced accordingly.

See an example engagement and cost

£700 to £750 / dayAgreed days each week for the duration of the engagement.

Time estimates include preparation, working sessions, analysis and agreed outputs. Scope, scheduling and any additional capacity are confirmed before work begins.

Consulting and interim work are my current focus, but for the right role, with the right people and the right problems to solve, I would also consider a permanent position.
Read the CV

Discuss the right shape

04 / About

I started close to where systems break. It turned out to be useful training.

My career moved from testing and release into platform, product and service leadership because the interesting problem was rarely just the defect.

I wanted to understand the customer journey around it, the operational pressure behind it, the supplier dependency underneath it and the decision that allowed it to keep returning. That curiosity has taken me through enterprise SaaS, international ecommerce programmes and the digital ecosystem of one of the world’s best-known luxury retailers.

I’m comfortable moving between strategy and delivery, but I stay deliberately practical. Good work should leave people with clearer ownership, stronger capability and a next move they can actually make.

I’m also exploring how AI-assisted development, automation and orchestration can shorten the distance between an idea and a useful working capability, without pretending judgement and good engineering have become optional.

View LinkedIn profile

Product leadershipPlatform strategyCommerceMobileLoyaltyService operationsDelivery recoveryAI-enabled capability

05 / Contact

Tell me what you need to move forward.

You do not need a polished brief. Tell me what you are trying to achieve, what is getting in the way and when it matters. We can work out the right shape from there.

Immediately Available

Remote-first, with London and hybrid work available by agreement.

Emailjobs@discomcdisco.com WhatsApp

Email is preferred. WhatsApp works for a quick introduction. A role outline, challenge or early conversation is enough to begin.