Product manager. Builder. Father.
I like making
useful products.
I’m Jordan. I’ve built products at Culture Amp and Melio, and co-founded Zinc and Doer. I’m interested in how useful technology can improve people’s lives and contribute to long-term progress.
Selected work
Melio
Embedded B2B payments
Melio helps businesses manage and pay their bills. I worked on its embedded payments product, partnering with major banks and financial institutions to improve payment experiences within their own platforms.
Culture Amp
Employee development & manager capability
Develop
I led discovery, design and development, taking Develop from zero paying customers to over 1,000. The product helps organisations create clearer career paths and support employee growth.
Skills Coach
I led discovery, design and development, growing Skills Coach from zero users to over 200,000. It teaches management skills through short, spaced activities delivered in Slack, Teams and email.
Zinc
AI for people managers
I co-founded Zinc, an AI assistant that turned managers’ 1:1 conversations into material for performance reviews. We ran pilots but ultimately couldn’t make the business work. I wrote about what we learned and what I’d do differently.
Doer
Psychology & behaviour change
I co-founded Doer with my friend Kemble Song to help people overcome procrastination using techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy. The app reached 40,000 people.
The app is no longer available, but we’ve made the content free as a 10-part podcast series.
Writing
Notes from building products and companies, making decisions and figuring out how to live well.
Product & company building
How to build an AI evaluation system that actually works
Lessons from evaluating AI products in the real world.
Read the essay ↗ Founder reflectionsFailing to make something people want
A candid account of Zinc and five months chasing product-market fit.
Read the essay ↗ Product leadershipThree hard-earned lessons from launching a company’s second and third product
What I learned about validation, launches and finding a route to market.
Read the essay ↗More on product & company building
- The five laws of human feedbackWhy performance reviews fail and how to fix them.
- Ten very intense minutesReflections on my Y Combinator interviews.
- Setting smarter goals for product developmentA framework for setting goals as a product takes shape.
- The social mechanics of product pivotsHow to bring a team along when changing direction.
- Should visionaries be more pessimistic?Optimism, pessimism and project management.
Decisions & everyday life
- My 47 favorite products: ranked by value for moneyThe things that give me the most value for what they cost.
- Making better purchasing decisionsA practical way to compare a purchase with what else the money could buy.
- How to experience the ultimate state of happiness while playing billiardsFinding flow and enjoyment through play.
- When to play a knight in Settlers of CatanUsing expected value to make a better game decision.
Values & relationships
- Children are not obstacles to your positive impact on the world; they are your impactThinking about parenting and the contribution we make to the future.
- Should vegans oppose animal welfare?An adversarial collaboration on campaigns for incremental improvements.
- Quarterly relationship reviewsMaking time to reflect on and improve a relationship.
Personal growth & getting things done
- Go until failureWhy we avoid failure and what to do about it.
- Achieving long-term goals
- How to liveSystems for living a life worth living.
- How to generate life goalsClarifying what matters.
- How to decide what not to doNarrowing your focus.
- How to set achievable goalsTurning intentions into workable goals.
- How to be consistentCreating long-term accountability.
- How to accomplish complex goalsMaking progress through uncertainty.
Overcoming procrastination: the 10-part series
Read the lessons below, or listen to the free Doer podcast.
Other things I’ve made
Small experiments, useful systems and things I made to learn something new.
BetterBuyList
I built an app to help people make more thoughtful purchases by comparing an item with what else the same money could buy. The app is retired, but the idea still holds up.
Read the idea behind BetterBuyList ↗Book summaries on video
I made video summaries to revisit useful ideas, help people choose their next book and teach myself video editing.
Watch on YouTube ↗A values-driven life
A conversation about the systems I use to live by my values, recorded for a Master of Counselling Practice course.
Watch the interview ↗Learning short-form video
My niece once described ordinary YouTube videos as the “sideways” ones. I took the hint and tried making vertical videos.
See my TikTok experiments ↗A year not procrastinating
In 2021, I started a daily practice of working through procrastination. I wrote about what it helped me do and the exercises behind it.
Read the reflection ↗Learning to code
I completed Codecademy’s front-end engineering programme in 2022 and built websites and interactive games to put it into practice.
Play the procrastination game ↗Something worth building?
I’m exploring product roles in Melbourne. If you’re building a useful product with a thoughtful team, I’d love to hear about it.