AI Product Advisory

Most AI consulting ends with a deck. This ends with something shipped.

Product leadership and engineering execution for founders and teams building with AI. From one-session diagnostics to full MVP sprints.

Track record
Klu.ai Co-founder & CEO Amazon Global UX Productboard Sr. Director Freeletics Head of Product Fuel Built in 40 days Capital One Product Design

The gap between AI strategy and a working product is where most companies stall.

You have the vision. You might even have the roadmap. But translating AI ambition into a product that users actually touch requires someone who has done it before, repeatedly, at companies from Amazon to their own startups.

Every Groundworks engagement starts from your customer and your business problem, and ends with a written artifact you can hand to an engineer and act on.

Traditional consulting

Strategy deck. Workshop. Invoice.

Six-figure engagements that produce impressive slides and roadmaps that sit in a Google Drive folder. Your team still doesn't know what to build first.

Groundworks

Decision memo. Sprint plan. Shipped product.

Concrete deliverables your engineers can execute on immediately. Build-vs-buy decisions, user stories with acceptance criteria, and when needed, the build itself.

Four ways to work together

Every engagement is scoped, priced, and delivers a concrete artifact.

$1,000
AI Product Diagnostic
One product area, one user workflow, one 60-minute session. You get clarity in 72 hours.
  • Written Decision Memo
  • Build-vs-buy recommendation
  • Success metrics defined
  • 30-day experiment backlog
Monthly retainer
Founder Build Advisory
For founders without a CTO who need product leadership, not just advice.
  • Monthly MVP Spec Pack (PRD, stories, criteria)
  • Contractor scorecard
  • Sprint plans
  • Weekly 30-min build reviews
Monthly retainer
Fractional AI Product Lead
For product teams shipping LLM features who need embedded AI expertise.
  • Monthly exec readout
  • Evaluation harness spec
  • Experiment pipeline
  • Weekly 60-min working sessions
$120,000
40-Day MVP Build Sprint
Product leadership and engineering execution in one sprint. The same process that shipped Fuel from idea to App Store in 40 days.
  • Full product leadership
  • Engineering execution
  • Working MVP, deployed
  • Technical architecture docs
  • Handoff-ready go-to-market plan

Stephen M. Walker II

AI product advisor and builder. Co-founded Klu.ai (LLM evaluation platform, backed by a16z and Sequoia scouts). Led product at Amazon, Productboard, and Freeletics. Shipped a full iOS nutrition app, Fuel, solo in 40 days using AI.

Two decades of product work across startups and enterprises. The through-line: closing the gap between what a team wants to build and what actually gets shipped.

smw.ai Klu.ai Fuel App ProductStrategy.co
20+
Years in product
40M+
Users reached at Freeletics
40
Days: idea to App Store
$1.7M
Raised for Klu.ai

Your AI product shouldn't live in a slide deck. It should live in your users' hands.

Groundworks exists because the best strategy is a shipped product. Every engagement ends with something real.