Darren Card

Applied AI studio and R&D for three kinds of company: software companies, agencies and service businesses. Specialists join by the project. Client work from 2026.

• Studio work in progress, unnamed until each party agrees: a client, an environmental consultancy of about 90 people (system design, implementation plan and a working prototype), and a project with an experiential production studio (business case, packages, pricing and decks for a productised line).
• Applied R&D: AI-coding upskilling and a working thesis that shipped work can be read for whether it landed.

Find out what a product organisation should measure now that agents do the producing, and build the instrument. Solo and in public; R&D, with no users, customers or go-to-market.

• Built a diagnostic: three frameworks, 88 scoring units, version-locked for comparison over time.
• A pattern engine reads tension across frameworks (team ahead of product, build ahead of team).
• Built Throughline: reads a product organisation’s whole stack, from strategy to go-to-market, to show the next move and the evidence. No model invents a number.
• Built to read 50+ modern product tools, with an open read API and an MCP server; today it reads public record only, about one company, and is not used in client work.
• Built in Claude Code with Next.js on Vercel, Turso, Clerk, Stripe, the Claude API, PostHog, Mintlify, Plain and Sentry.

R&DTwo R&D products live, the diagnostic and Throughline; Throughline reads one company’s public record.

Top Down Ventures invested in Lexful’s $3M pre-seed, the round I joined.

Employee #1, with twelve months to take an AI-native documentation platform for MSPs from a blank page to launch, on a $3M pre-seed, against a $100M+ ARR incumbent.

• Hired all ten across product, design, engineering, operations, support and IT.
• Defined the data foundation: cross-system ingestion, entity resolution and AI retrieval.
• Set the agent permission model with the principal architect: per customer, per role, a credential vault, and an MCP server.
• Defined “good enough to ship” with design partners and owned the evals: regression suites, scored rubrics and human reviews.
• Owned AI unit economics: token budgets, inference tiers and credit pricing modelled to 75% gross margin.
• Lexful’s SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 controls in place at launch, while the SOC 2 observation window ran.

RESULTLaunched in twelve months (six to plan, raise and hire, then six to build), with paying customers won from the incumbent.

Joined on a $3M pre-seed from Top Down Ventures and others. The $7M seed (Top Down Ventures and York IE, Jun 2026) came after the role ended, on the product and team built to launch.

First product and technology leader at a learning operations platform selling an SMB point solution, with enterprise ambitions and no path to them.

• Month one: assessed the product and recommended rebuilding the prototype into an enterprise-grade platform.
• Rebuilt the team: product, design, engineering, delivery, data and operations under one leader, about 20 people, senior engineers replacing junior for bench strength.
• Guided the rebuild from the data model through business logic and UI over seven months.
• Four-figure ACVs became six-figure multi-year deals: EY, Sun Life, General Mills, FM Global and Ace Hardware.
• Created the LearnOps category within HR tech, and the framework behind it.
• Engineering from low to high on Google’s DORA measures in six months; developer survey across most SPACE dimensions.

RESULTThe pivot was a key element of the $5.5M USD Series A, Sep 2023, led by Grotech Ventures.

Joined pre-Series A; revenue tripled during the tenure, with the 2024 plan set to double it. Also: Entrepreneur in Residence, Mar 2021 to May 2024, at a venture studio focused on IT services and MSP software.

Build the product team and process for a composable, API-first, headless commerce platform where the API and SDK were the product.

• Hired, coached and mentored five PMs across two deployment models: multi-tenant SaaS and self-managed microservices for regulated enterprises.
• Proved the platform under peak load: T-Mobile through iPhone launch events, and Black Friday.
• Consulted on the Moltin acquisition decision (Jan 2020); the product team I led ran its integration: multi-tenant microservices, business-user tooling and ready-made commerce experiences.
• Had a hand in the Composable Commerce Hub partner ecosystem and the AWS Marketplace listing (Jan 2020).
• COVID: reallocated the roadmap in weeks to buy-online-pickup for retail and manufacturing customers.

RESULTThe roadmap was pulled forward 18 to 24 months, and the platform held through every peak event.

Joined after the $43M CAD Series B (Sageview, Jun 2018). The company raised $90M USD in 2022 on the composable position, after the tenure.

Modernise how custom landing pages were created and measured, with marketing qualified leads as the outcome.

• Moved what the team measured to satisfaction, engagement, adoption and retention as the feature scorecard.
• Ran an applied ML programme on personalised landing pages with ML engineers and data scientists, ahead of the martech AI cycle. R&D, not a shipped product.
• Partnered with Google and HubSpot on product and channel.

RESULTThe team measured features on outcomes, and an ML programme was running in flight.

First product leader at a marketing performance management company, joining two months before the $22M CAD Series B (Susquehanna Growth Equity, December 2015).

• Built product, design and product operations from zero. Hired four PMs and two designers.
• Moved the product from budget tracking to ROI for enterprise marketing teams: Microsoft, GE Digital and Charles Schwab.
• Launched strategic planning and marketing performance insights add-ons, raising ACVs.
• Built the integration framework and partner programme: one cross-tenant data model, benchmarks, and recommendations and personalisation on top.
• Quarterly customer advisory board: Microsoft, Box, Red Hat and others.
• Briefed Gartner, Forrester and IDC to define marketing performance management as a category.

RESULTARR from $5M to $20M through the tenure, on a product function that had not existed.

Turn a corporate event app business built on custom builds into a SaaS platform. Recruited by the COO three months before the $3.2M round (BDC, Vancity, May 2013).

• Every customer was a custom build, and every new customer cost engineering time that never came back.
• Set up a senior stakeholder committee to hold custom requests against the roadmap.
• Led delivery and launch of the single multi-tenant cloud platform, and migrated 100+ customers onto it, Visa among them.
• Shipped the first Apple Watch-compatible conference app, timed to Apple’s launch.

RESULTOne platform, 100+ customers on it, and a team freed for new features. #1 on Deloitte’s 2013 Technology Fast 50 Canada during the tenure.

Take over the core research and community platform, a two-sided SaaS product where community members contribute research at scale.

• Launched two 0-to-1 products from co-innovation work with customers: IdeaScreenPlus (idea testing, Molson Coors, Intel) and ReactionPlus (video perception, ESPN, NHL).
• Ran the core platform: 300+ global enterprise customers and millions of community members.
• Launched the first mobile survey experience in the market, on iPhone and iPad, timed to the iPad launch (April 2010).

RESULTBoth new products passed $1M recurring within 12 months, and the core platform reached millions of users.

Ran the custom development services division on the core platform’s APIs and data, and owned the P&L.

RESULTOver $2M including recurring maintenance, and two projects that became the 0-to-1 products above.