About Gabriel

Product judgment for work that has to become real.

I’m a product leader, founder, and author. For 13 years, I’ve helped turn complicated customer and business problems into products teams can build, test, and improve.

Today I help product leaders turn uncertain AI opportunities into buildable, testable product direction.

Explore the five-day sprint See selected work
Portrait of Gabriel Fenton
Founder of Vivid Resume · Author of the Auteur Framework
The throughline

The tools changed. The responsibility did not.

AI makes it possible to explore and implement faster. It does not answer the product questions: Which problem matters? What should the first release prove? What will fail? How will we know the result is useful?

  1. Product foundation

    13 years in product

    Across AI SaaS, fintech, marketplaces, and customer platforms: finding the real constraint, writing buildable direction, and aligning people around an outcome.

    See selected work
  2. Founder application

    Vivid Resume

    Building a closed-beta AI product made quality, reliability, user trust, scope, and the decision to ship immediate rather than theoretical.

    Read the founder case study
  3. Published method

    The Auteur Framework

    Thirteen working principles drawn from directing AI through real production decisions, review, and failures.

    Explore the framework
How I work with teams

Make complex work clear enough to move.

The collaboration follows one decision from ambiguity to evidence. Each step makes the thinking visible so engineering, design, and business stakeholders can challenge it and move together.

  1. 01
    Diagnose

    Find the actual problem

    Get past the requested feature to the customer, operational, or strategic constraint underneath it.

    What I do
    Interrogate the request against available customer evidence, business pressure, constraints, and what remains unknown.
    Team leaves with
    A bounded problem statement and the decision the work must enable.
  2. 02
    Align

    Create shared direction

    Give engineering, design, and business stakeholders a decision they can understand and act on.

    What I do
    Make the tradeoffs, smallest useful release, protected behavior, and open risks explicit.
    Team leaves with
    A shared direction brief with a clear scope and acceptance questions.
  3. 03
    Prove

    Hold work to evidence

    Use tests, user feedback, and outcomes to distinguish something finished from something merely generated.

    What I do
    Use a prototype, evaluation approach, feedback, and failure states to test the direction before a build commitment.
    Team leaves with
    Acceptance evidence, visible risks, and a recommendation the next plan can use.
Why consulting, now

The highest-leverage moment is before a team commits the build.

Thirteen years in product showed me what unclear direction costs a team. Building Vivid Resume made the speed and failure modes of AI-assisted delivery immediate. The AI Product Direction Sprint concentrates those lessons before momentum hardens around the wrong build.

It combines product strategy with a tangible prototype so the direction can be seen, questioned, and acted on.

Bring
One AI opportunity, the pressure behind it, available evidence, constraints, and what is still uncertain.
Leave with
A prioritized use case, focused first-release scope, clickable prototype, evaluation plan, and 90-day roadmap.
See how the five days work
Perspective beyond the brief

The work is better when I stay curious about the world around it.

I’ve spent 13 years living internationally and have experience across more than 25 countries. That has made me slower to assume there is only one sensible way to understand a problem—and quicker to ask what context I may be missing.

CULTURE

Look past the first assumption

Living across cultures keeps me open to different needs, constraints, and ways of solving the same problem.

OUTDOORS

Get outside the system

Hiking, swimming, and motorcycle travel give me distance from the screen and room to see the work more clearly.

MAKING

Follow structure and story

Strategy games, photography, and writing keep me attentive to systems, details, and the consequences of small choices.

That wider perspective shapes how I collaborate: listen closely, question the obvious answer, and make space for the team to challenge the direction before committing to it.

One focused place to begin

What product decision does your team need to make next?

Bring the opportunity, the pressure behind it, and what is still uncertain.

Discuss your product decision Read the framework