Most product teams ship fast. Few know whether the work compounds.
I built DAC because I kept watching teams hit shipping cadence and miss strategic trajectory. The metric dashboards filled up. The customer voice got louder. Coaches met quarterly with stale takes. Nothing in between told the team whether the work was actually building toward the thing.
DAC is the coach you'd hire if you could find one who keeps up.
Darren Card, founder, dacard.ai. CPTO at Lexful. Twenty years building B2B SaaS product orgs across eight verticals.
Product operations is a category. Coaches are a category. Diagnostics are a category. None of them moved when AI did.
Cursor codes. Claude Code ships PRs. Devin runs cycles. Lindy runs ops. Your agents have tripled the work that lands and halved the work that needs human attention. The team that managed it eight months ago is operating against a different ceiling now.
The coaching that scales with that doesn't exist yet. Quarterly fractional CPOs can't keep up with weekly model updates. Reforge teaches generalized best practice that goes stale faster than it ships. Executive coaches read humans, not stacks.
Agentic Product Operations is the category for what's missing. A coach that reads your stack, runs the cycle with you, has a take grounded in your evidence, and re-reads when the conditions change. DAC is the first product in it.
CPTO role searches are up 110% since H1 2024. Enterprise spend on AI coding tools hit four billion dollars in the same window, growing 4.1x year over year. The work changed. The measurement did not.
Atlassian acquired DX. Existing coaching market got consolidated into a single dev-productivity story. The AI-native product operations gap stayed open. That is the window.
Not an analytics dashboard. Not a fractional advisor. Not a knowledge base. Not a process consultant. Not a workflow tool.
DAC is a coach with tenure inside your org that grows over a 90-day onboarding ritual. The new-hire pattern you already use for senior hires, applied to an AI coach, with the same accountability structure: probation review at day 30, first public pushback at day 60, graduation at day 90.
If the framing sounds unfamiliar, that's the point. The category didn't exist last year.