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Natalie C.

natalie

Supporting Leaders

Empowering Teams

Hi! I'm Natalie, I help ambitious teams go from scrappy to scaled by building the product discipline, processes, and culture that create the foundations needed for success.

The Problem

You've proven product-market fit and now you're expected to scale, fast. But your roadmap is a reactive mess. Sales wants features the board promised. Engineering is pushing back on timelines. Customer feedback pulls you in ten directions. And you're the bottleneck on every product decision.

What you need isn't another strategy deck or a prioritization framework pulled off the internet. You need someone who can sit with your team, untangle the mess, and build the discipline to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The Solution

Real product transformation doesn't come from strategy decks, it comes from going deep. Understanding the codebase, sitting with engineering, hearing what customers actually say versus what gets filtered through sales.

I bring both sides: the strategic thinking to align your roadmap with business outcomes, and the engineering fluency to build processes your team will actually commit to. No frameworks that collect dust. No cross-functional alignment that falls apart the moment someone leaves the room. Discipline that scales with you.

The Proof

  • At Cruise: I built product strategy across 6 competing business units, evolving a single-purpose marketing site into a company-wide platform. Established cross-functional frameworks that eliminated constant firefighting while maintaining product coherence across customer service, recruiting, marketing, Delivery, Ridehail, and regulatory teams. The result drove a 362% increase in organic traffic to our company website, 80% improvement in build performance and developer efficiency, while modeling new accessibility standards across the org, .

  • At First String Digital: I led the company pivot from web consultancy to restaurant SaaS, designing a tiered subscription model that generated 30% revenue growth in the first quarter. Built a self-service portal with integrated reservations, payments, and ordering that eliminated the services bottleneck and created a scalable revenue model.

  • At StitchIT Media (Co-Founder/CTO): I took a mobile video startup from concept to funded MVP through the Founders Institute. Conducted customer discovery across 3 segments, defined product vision and revenue model, and delivered a working prototype.

  • At Simple A: I led user research for a financial services platform that surfaced critical product gaps. Produced a product strategy which resulted in reduced support tickets by 70% and won 2 follow-up contracts. As one executive put it: "You didn't just fix our process, you changed how we think about product."

How I Work

Go deep before going fast. I start by understanding what's actually happening; not just the roadmap on paper, but how decisions get made, where things break down between teams, and why what's shipping doesn't match what leadership thinks is shipping.

Bridge strategy and execution. I don't hand off a strategy deck and wish you luck. I sit with engineering, build the prioritization frameworks, run the hard conversations with stakeholders, and stay close to the work until the discipline is real. Not theoretical.

Build capability, not dependency. The goal is always a team that operates with product discipline whether I'm in the room or not. That means mentoring your people, establishing rituals that actually stick, and creating processes the team owns and not simply ones they tolerate.

About Me

I've spent 20 years on both sides of the product-engineering divide, as a software engineer, engineering manager, and product leader. I've built the features and shaped the strategy. That foundation is why engineering teams trust me and leadership gets straight answers.

I've led process and product strategy across autonomous vehicles at Cruise, SaaS platforms, mobile startups, and enterprise corporations like Amazon and Microsoft. I've navigated pivots from services to product-led growth, managed regulated industry complexity, and built roadmaps that survived executive scrutiny. I've seen what breaks as companies scale, and I recognize the patterns before they become crises.

I'm direct, collaborative, and grounded in reality. I ask hard questions, surface uncomfortable truths about product-market fit and delivery risk, and facilitate the decisions that get both engineering and leadership committed to the same plan. Teams appreciate that I understand their constraints. Executives value that I don't sugarcoat what's working and what isn't.