I'm Jack, a product engineer and designer. I build products that help people think, work, and play.

I build human-first products that treat the human side as seriously as the technical side. Interfaces that feel conversational, systems that explain their reasoning, and technology that fits into how people actually work rather than forcing them to adapt.

For over 20 years, I've worked with teams at Google, IBM, Air New Zealand, Kpler, EE, News UK, Tesco, and The Economist, sitting in the space between product strategy and hands-on engineering, designing systems and shipping products that make the complex feel simple.

Mass workspaces

Mass

Run synthetic research on your desktop with local LLM models.

#AI#desktop

#AI

Mass

My mum thinks it's cool. My friends think it's as odd as a cat with wings. Getting human opinion is hard. It's time-consuming, expensive, and we're not sure we can trust the result. That's why we built Mass, a platform to deploy hundreds of synthetic human personas that think, reason, and respond like the target audience.

They're brutally honest and unfiltered, giving a real sense of what audiences want in minutes, not months. And at a fraction of the cost. Understand perspectives, validate messaging, explore positioning, and more before committing to the real human research.

www.holdmass.com
Mass

Mass

Human insight, reimagined through synthetic minds. A platform that allows you to create synthetic human personas that can think, reason, and respond like real people.

#AI#identity#design#product

On the River

On the River

Rivers and canals, mapped. Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Belgium waterways, locks, clubs, channel guides, and route planning.

#identity#product

Emmly

Emmly

Creative workflow management platform for creative teams using the inspiration and work they already have. Connected to the latest generative AI tools, from Seedance to Gemini.

#AI

Emmly

Emmly

Make space for what you imagine. Creative partner that unlocks new ways of thinking, feeling, and making. Emmly empowers creators to explore, experiment, and create without limits.

#AI#identity#product

Beryl

Beryl

E-commerce website for Beryl, a London-based bike light and transport company. Today, they support over 300,000 people using their bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters and cargo bikes to get to work, to university, and to explore.

#ecommerce#web

Appo

Appo

#AI

Appo

Appo

Prototype build to help businesses automate customer support and sales for dental practices using AI and chatbots, with HIPAA-compliant data collection, storage, and insights.

#AI#identity#web

FaultFixers

FaultFixers

Identity for FaultFixers, a facilities maintenance company.

#identity

FaultFixers

FaultFixers

#identity

Product design, thinking machines, and AEO.

The human side is as serious as the technical side. Interfaces that feel conversational, systems that explain their reasoning, and technology that fits into how people actually work.

Product design and engineering

Designing the interface and writing the code that makes it happen. This is the core of my fractional consultancy work, and what I do every day.

Thinking machines

How people talk to it, how it reasons, how it fails, and how it stays in production. Not just designing the interface, but engineering products that make inference trustworthy.

AEO and GEO

Answer engine optimisation for your site and products, making them the source an AI assistant quotes when it answers a question. Unlike SEO, which competes for a ranked link, AEO competes for a citation inside a generated answer.

Let's talk

If you're building a product and you need the human side of the engineering as well as the system, tell me what you're building and which services you need. Either reach out by email or feel free to book some of my time on my calendar.

hello@thingsthat.comBook a 30-minute call

I'm always honest about what I can and can't do. If I'm not the right person for it, I'll tell you straight up. I have a large network of incredible designers, engineers and innovators, so if I'm not the person, I'll know someone who is.

#insights

Analysing Christmas Adverts 2025

13 December 2025

Mass Vision is a persona-based video sentiment tool: a synthetic screening room for ads. You upload a film, synthetic personas watch it, and narrate reactions moment by moment, explaining why, tied to identity, lived experience, ethics, and context. The output is a tension map (not a safe average): where the same scene splits audiences, who feels seen, and who feels repelled.

The Christmas ads analysis shows why this matters: social sentiment gave broad takes after launch; Mass Vision shows the segment mechanics underneath, at specific moments. Run it in minutes, iterate while changes are still cheap, and stop learning the hard way in public.

analysing-christmas-adverts