I don't wait for
the playbook.
I write it.

Modus Create builds serious software. Official Atlassian partner. AWS partner. GitHub partner. A team of engineers and consultants who are genuinely exceptional at what they do.

But their Atlassian Marketplace products had a problem that engineering couldn't fix. They were invisible.

Not because the products weren't good — they were. But they lived entirely inside the Atlassian Marketplace, where they competed on SEO keywords instead of brand recognition, communicated through billing contacts instead of actual users, and had no direct relationship with the customers who relied on them every day.

There was no Product Marketing function. No positioning. No message architecture. No GTM process. No customer feedback loop. Just: here, brand it and go.

The Strategy

The first thing I did wasn't write copy. It was listen. I spent the opening weeks inside Atlassian community forums, support threads, user reviews, and customer conversations — not to gather quotes for a slide deck, but to understand what people were trying to do and where the products were falling short of the story.

What I found was a diagramming tool with real traction and zero identity. Users loved it. Nobody remembered its name. That became the starting point.

I repositioned and relaunched it as Just Add+ Diagrams — then used that as the foundation for a broader brand architecture: Just Add+, a unified product ecosystem designed to give current and future products a home, a name, and a reason to be remembered.

Then I built JustAdd.com from scratch. Not a marketing website — a direct relationship with customers. For the first time, Modus could communicate with actual users instead of billing contacts. Product education, SEO acquisition, release communications, community engagement, and customer research all flowed through it. We could finally talk to the people using the products.

To operate as a team of one, I built AI-assisted workflows for content, competitive intelligence, launch planning, and sales enablement. I ran co-marketing programs with Atlassian and GitHub, placing Modus products inside larger conversations about developer productivity and workflow automation.

House 2106 is the kind of place people fall in love with the moment they walk in. A beautifully curated gallery in Houston — furniture, art, objects, and one-of-a-kind pieces sourced with a genuine eye. The kind of inventory that makes designers stop mid-sentence and pull out their phones.

They hired Bament Group to grow it. The brief seemed simple: more traffic, more sales, better marketing.

I spent the first two weeks asking questions instead. Who are your best customers? What do they buy? Why do they come back? What does your sales data say about the last three years?

The answers were thin. Not because the owners weren't smart — they were. But the business had been built on instinct, relationships, and taste. Which had worked. Until it needed to scale.

The Strategy

Before I touched a single ad, I built the infrastructure to understand the business. Modern POS system. Inventory tracking. Customer data. Sales reporting with enough granularity to actually learn something. Then I went back three years and did a full financial analysis — sales performance, customer segments, inventory trends, margins, acquisition channels, retention patterns.

What I found changed the entire strategy. The highest-value customers weren't who the business thought they were. The inventory categories with the best margins weren't getting attention. There were acquisition channels with real potential that hadn't been touched. Every dollar we spent after that was aimed at something we actually understood.

As results improved, my role grew. What started as a marketing engagement became closer to a General Manager role. I built sourcing relationships with interior designers and collectors across the country, expanded distribution to FirstDibs — putting inventory in front of a national audience of design-conscious buyers — and hired and managed physical and digital design talent to keep the brand consistent at every touchpoint.

One problem stayed stubborn: the gallery itself. The in-person experience was extraordinary. Traditional ecommerce made it look ordinary. So I built a virtual gallery using Matterport — a fully immersive 3D walkthrough letting customers browse thousands of products online as if walking through the space — paired with an AI shopping assistant for questions about inventory, pricing, and logistics.

For the first time, the digital experience was actually worthy of the physical one.

This was before "For You" playlists. Before algorithmic recommendations were the default. Before Spotify knew what Discover Weekly was.

In the early days of streaming, millions of songs existed across every major platform. But finding music beyond the top charts — anything in classical, blues, jazz, world music, niche genres — was genuinely broken. The platforms had a search problem. They just didn't know how to name it yet.

We did.

The Strategy

People don't search for music the way libraries organize it. They search by mood, by instrument, by era, by activity — the way they feel, not the way a catalog is structured. If you could build products organized around how people actually search, you could surface content that would otherwise disappear and turn it into something people would find, love, and return to.

As Product Director for North America, I helped develop and distribute 12,000+ digital products — genre, mood, instrument, era, and activity-based music collections engineered for how consumers actually searched across Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and every major platform. The approach consistently outperformed traditional catalog releases — same music, better product.

To scale it, I built relationships with curators worldwide and worked with dev teams on two internal platforms: Web Producer — enabling remote product creation across distributed teams years before remote work was common — and The Brain, which aggregated search trends, marketplace data, and metadata signals to surface emerging opportunities in near real-time.

Spotify — Consumer App Development

As Spotify's catalog grew, discovery became a core product challenge. Working alongside their team, I helped design and launch five genre-specific consumer apps: Classify, Bluesify, Jazzify, Jukebox, and Music of the World. I owned market research, user journey development, persona creation, wireframing, feature planning, and developer handoff from concept through launch.

Spinnup — Built with Universal Music Group

Our work in digital discovery caught Universal Music Group's attention. Independent artists wanted global distribution without traditional label complexity. Labels wanted earlier visibility into emerging talent. Together, X5 and UMG built Spinnup — a self-service distribution platform for independent artists that doubled as a talent discovery engine for one of the biggest music companies in the world.

Drawing on my product background — and my own experience as a recording artist — I contributed to product ideation, artist journey design, UX validation, and go-to-market efforts across European markets.