Alexander Harvey-Falkboo, Product Leader

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Alexander Harvey-Falkboo

Product Leader

A creative space outside the day job: things I've built, notes on building products, and a few things I love.

About

Portrait of Alexander Harvey-Falkboo
Alexander Harvey-FalkbooProduct Leader

Hi! I'm a product leader who is curious about what the future holds.

New tools, new ways of working. I want to explore them, and use this website to share them.

I started out in marketing and partnerships, at a social enterprise for charities, Samsung's in-house agency Cheil, and the startups Conversocial and Yoti. I worked with everyone from more than a thousand charities to The British Museum, and learned how a good story gets people to try something new.

Then I moved into product: growing Trustpilot's business website, helping Maersk adopt modern product practices and leading enterprise SaaS at GAN Integrity. Today I'm a Group Product Manager at Veo, whose AI-powered cameras film and analyse sport. I lead three cross-functional teams behind the products that bring in about 80% of Veo's ARR, with machine learning and AI at the heart of what we build.

A few highlights

Project · mobile app

Pip Pip

Pip Pip lets parents know their child has arrived at a friend's house. The other parent confirms with one tap from the lock screen. It's in a pilot, being tested on Android and iOS.

Visit pippipapp.com

Notebook

Notes on products, teams and building things.

· 2 min read

harveyfalkboo.com

I wanted a place on the internet that felt like mine. Somewhere to put the things I make when nobody has asked me to make them.

Most of my working day goes into products for other people, and I enjoy that work. This site is for the rest, the projects I start because I'm curious about something and want to see where it goes.

So I built my desk. The real one sits in front of a yellow brick wall, with a copper pipe running along it and a green leather top on an old oak desk. You're sitting in my chair right now. Drag to look around and click on whatever catches your eye.

Everything on the desk leads somewhere. The phone opens Pip Pip, the first app I've built and put in the hands of testers. The books on the shelf are the ones I keep going back to, and the polaroids are photos I took. Press play on the speaker and see how many notes you can catch.

I want it to feel like you just missed me. The coffee is still warm, and my phone is reminding me to water the plants. I stepped out for a minute and you wandered in.

The site is also an experiment in how I build now. I described what I wanted to Claude, we mocked it up together and then made it, one small change at a time. I don't write code for a living. A couple of years ago something like this would have been out of reach for me. I want to explore what happens when the distance between an idea and a working thing gets this short.

An early flat mockup of the site: a desk seen from above, with a speaker, a notebook, sticky notes, a lamp, a phone showing Pip Pip, three polaroids and cards for email, LinkedIn and X.
How it started

I'll write here about building products and working with teams. Expect notes written while I'm still figuring things out.

If you want to say hello, the sticky notes on the monitor have my email, LinkedIn and X.

Whiteboard

How I work, simplified

  1. The product is already moving when I join. First I learn what's been built, and why.
  2. Then I get close to what pulls on it, and bring it along: what customers need, where the business opportunity is, and what the technology now makes possible.
  3. Once I understand it, I set a clear near-term vision and share it. It gives everyone something concrete to talk around.
  4. I bring the team with me. A clear story is how a team becomes believers, and then missionaries.
  5. The data is rarely complete. I'm comfortable making the call on what we have.
  6. The first answer is usually the obvious one. I keep distilling until something sharper shows up.
  7. The sensible version ships first, as the foundation. Alongside it I explore off to the side, and that's often where the better idea comes from.
  8. Then we measure it against the targets we set, and what we learn sends us round again.

On the shelf

Books I keep near the desk

No Rules RulesReed Hastings and Erin Meyer
The Culture CodeDaniel Coyle
Co-IntelligenceEthan Mollick
The Hard Thing About Hard ThingsBen Horowitz
InspiredMarty Cagan
SapiensYuval Noah Harari
The Silk RoadsPeter Frankopan
The Art of PeaceMorihei Ueshiba, translated by John Stevens
FoundationIsaac Asimov
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and LettersWalt Whitman, edited by Emory Holloway

Say hello

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