Ari Franklin

I am a product and business leader who helps growing organizations become better at creating value.

My work spans startups, consulting, Fortune 500 retail, ecommerce, marketplaces, internal platforms, product practice leadership, and AI-enabled workflows. Across those settings, the pattern has been consistent: I am at my best when the problem is bigger than a single product roadmap.

I help organizations clarify what matters, improve how decisions are made, develop stronger product leaders, and build operating models that make good work repeatable.

The Through-Line

My career has moved through different industries and company stages, but the underlying work has remained remarkably consistent.

Early in my career, I learned what it means to build and operate a business directly. I co-founded Uberpong, helped grow it from about $200K to more than $1M in annual revenue, and worked across product, operations, manufacturing, partnerships, ecommerce, branding, and customer experience.

At BuildASign, I led a roughly $5M ecommerce business unit, balancing growth, operations, partnerships, merchandising, and execution.

In product roles at XO Group, Pivotal, Stronghold, and Kohl's, my scope expanded from product optimization to organizational leadership: marketplace experimentation, enterprise consulting, team building, product strategy, internal platforms, executive alignment, product enablement, and leadership development.

I build products, but my highest leverage comes from improving the system around product work.

To me, that means creating improvements that help many teams, products, or leaders perform better over time. Examples include building a product organization, coaching dozens of Product Managers, creating shared product practices, and improving decision-support systems used across a business.

Impact

My work combines business outcomes with organizational capability building.

The important point is not only the size of the numbers. It is the variety of impact. I have created value through customer-facing products, internal platforms, strategic partnerships, product practice, leadership coaching, operating models, and business ownership.

My strongest examples include both direct business impact and durable capability building across teams and leaders.

How I Think About Product Leadership

My product philosophy starts with business value, customer value, and decision quality.

I do not begin with process for its own sake. I start by understanding the system:

• What problem is the organization solving?
• Who benefits?
• How does the business create value?
• What assumptions are driving decisions?
• What prevents good decisions from being made consistently?
• What capabilities need to be built?

That approach leads to a practical view of product leadership:

Products rarely fail only because teams cannot build software. They often struggle because organizations are unclear about what matters, why it matters, how decisions should be made, or how teams should work together.

My work focuses on those conditions.

Before proposing a roadmap, I want to understand what problem the business is solving, how success will be measured, what assumptions are driving the current direction, what customer or business evidence exists, and what organizational constraints will shape execution.

Leadership Style

My leadership style is direct, thoughtful, and systems-oriented.

I am known for:

• simplifying complex problems
• asking strong questions before proposing solutions
• connecting strategy with execution
• building trust across functions
• coaching Product Managers and leaders
• improving operating models without creating unnecessary bureaucracy
• grounding decisions in evidence and business context

I prefer healthy debate over false alignment. I value transparency about uncertainty, and I believe leaders improve organizations by helping people develop stronger judgment.

That shows up in how I work with teams:

I am strongest in organizations that have moved beyond early survival and now need to scale thoughtfully.

The Takeaway

I am a product leader for moments when growth creates complexity.

I bring founder experience, business ownership, enterprise product leadership, consulting range, team-building depth, and a coaching mindset. My strongest work happens when organizations need more than a roadmap: they need clearer decisions, stronger product leaders, better operating models, and teams aligned around meaningful outcomes.

In short:

I help organizations build better products by becoming better organizations.