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Derek Fidler
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Leading AI Transformation

Creating Flatpay Lab, a shared system for customer signal, coded prototypes and product context across the organization.

Role
Director of Product Strategy & UX
Year
2026 — Present
Flatpay Lab systems launcher with generalized product and design content
The real Flatpay Lab launcher and design system, rendered with generalized descriptions and a sample workspace.

Flatpay Lab grew out of a practical problem. AI initiatives were already changing how we worked across Product and Design, but each lived on its own. The opportunity was not another collection of experiments. It was to organize them into a system that could connect how the product organization learns, decides and builds.

The need was clearest in the volume of customer signal we receive. Support calls, retention conversations, sales visits, NPS responses, BI and PostHog all tell us something useful. Looking at each hunch individually does not scale. Lab gives those signals a common place to become evidence, then puts the highest-impact needs in front of product managers while there is still time to act on them.

From signal to a product decision

Voice of Customer dashboard with generalized customer needs and sample metrics
The real Voice of Customer interface rendered with fictional needs and sample metrics. No merchant data is shown.

Voice of Customer automates the work between raw feedback and product attention. Its current synthesis spans more than 284,000 support calls from January through July, alongside hundreds of product suggestions, NPS comments and retention records. It clusters related needs, ranks them by impact and urgency, and keeps the source context attached. Product managers can see patterns across markets instead of reviewing one channel at a time.

That changes the unit of analysis. We can move from debating isolated anecdotes to examining recurring needs across a large customer base. The model does not make the decision. It gives the team a much better surface on which to make one.

Design moved into code

During Flatpay's hackathon in May, I built the first version of the coded design system and the prototyping environment. We had been using Lovable to move quickly, but it separated prototypes from the real product language. The replacement connects our Figma components to a fully realized code system, so designers can work with Claude Code using the same components, tokens and patterns engineering will eventually see.

The design system now documents more than ninety foundations, content rules, components and patterns. By August, the catalog held fifteen published prototypes from eight contributors, including designers and product people beyond me. A prototype can begin inside the real system, become interactive before a handoff, and return to Figma with its tokens intact.

A specialist in every conversation

Executive Assistant daily briefing with generalized meetings, roadmap items and product signals
The real Executive Assistant interface rendered with fictional meetings, roadmap work and product signals.

Product Assistant turns repeatable expertise into nine specialists that can join a product person's daily work: data, research, strategy, design, product management, marketing, engineering, people and QA. Each works from the same Flatpay context the team uses, so the conversation begins with our strategy and product language instead of generic advice. How to AI makes the workflows legible, from asking a product question to building a prototype or analyzing a dataset.

Executive Assistant applies the same principle to attention. It assembles roadmap signals, agendas, 1:1 commitments, calendar context and product data into a daily view of what matters. Competitive Intel does it for the market, turning a stream of competitor activity into recurring research and product implications. The common idea is simple: give every product person the context a good manager carries and a sparring partner in every product discipline.

The next boundary is organizational

Executive sponsorship made room for the work, while interviews with product managers and designers kept it grounded in real jobs. The next constraint is not model capability. It is the partnership and governance required to move prototypes safely into production without turning exploration into shadow engineering.

That means clearer interfaces between Product, Design and Engineering, shared standards for review, and an explicit boundary between a prototype and shipped software. The Lab has made more people capable of exploring, synthesizing and building. The next step is making that capability part of how the organization works together.