The studio is open

I build product people and teams.

Twenty-five years building and scaling product at Nike, Amazon, Microsoft, and Dick's. Today that work goes into the people doing it: senior PMs operating at the next level, and teams that need product leadership before they can hire it.

The promotion is proof, not permission.
Brian Fenn
Brian FennPortland, OR

25+

Years

120+

Team built

Fortune 50

P&L scope

4

Global markets

Selected work
Nike · 2018–2022Sr. Director, PM & Head of Studio · ShanghaiTwo to 120+ · Maxim Award winner

Greater China Digital Platform

From two to 120+. Three platforms. One regulatory migration. Through COVID.

Arrived in Shanghai with two people and a mandate to build Nike's in-region digital capability from scratch, then scaled it to 120+ across product, design, and engineering. Led the full migration of every consumer experience into China-resident infrastructure for PIPL compliance while running three simultaneous platform partnerships: Alibaba on Tmall, Tencent on WeChat, Riot Games on the League of Legends Pro League. The WeChat mini-program won the Maxim Award, Nike's top org honor, and the China-for-China regulatory migration was a Maxim nominee. When COVID took every traditional retail channel dark, the WeChat platform was already built, and demand grew 20 percent through the collapse.

Scale

2 → 120+ · Product, Design, Engineering

Platforms

Alibaba · Tencent · Riot Games

Migration

PIPL-compliant China infrastructure · Maxim nominee

Result

+20% demand through COVID · Maxim winner (WeChat mini-program)

Full case study
Dick's Sporting Goods · 2024–2025Sr. Director, Product & Design · Connected Store Strategy800+ stores · 40,000+ teammates

Enterprise Retail Transformation

800+ stores. Hardware modernization. A POS fleet rebuilt from the ground up.

Defined and led the hardware and digital modernization strategy across an 800+ store physical footprint and 40,000+ teammates. The initiative shifted enterprise compute to the cloud and deployed a proprietary, home-built POS ecosystem to 100 percent of the fleet. Consolidating dozens of disparate operational apps into a unified mobile suite, backed by a central enterprise design system, AI labor scheduling, and advanced RFID, cut friction for frontline teams while driving gains in operational scale, inventory accuracy, and loss prevention.

Footprint

800+ stores · 40,000+ teammates

Infrastructure

Cloud migration · Proprietary POS fleet

Consolidation

Dozens of apps to one mobile suite

Systems

Design system · AI scheduling · RFID

Full case study
See all work

The method

Earned Intuition

Instinct with receipts.

Not a gut feeling. The opposite.You earn the ability to know what to do. The call comes fast because the homework is already done, and the receipts are there if anyone asks.

The argumentEvery framework gets you to the obvious answer. The calls that matter start one step past it, where the framework runs out. What you use there is not a guess. It is intuition you earned: the reps, the ownership, the pattern recognition that only comes from having been wrong enough times to know better. That is the illogical project.

Still building

Detent

Live · App Store
Detent iOS app

Point it at a bag of coffee. It reads the label and writes a precision brew profile to the connected hardware.

iOS · Computer Vision · IoT · Fellow Aiden

Staying close to the metal keeps the coaching honest.

App Store

kuno

Beta · TestFlight
kuno macOS app

Records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings entirely on-device. No subscription, no upload, no cost per call.

macOS · Whisper · On-device · Swift

Privacy-first from the first commit. That is a product decision, not a feature.

Request access
Currently

Advising founders and product teams, shipping kuno, and writing the frameworks in the open.

This is the proof a former operator cannot make. I am still building, so this year's reps become next year's frameworks. The receipts keep accruing.

Three ways to work
01Coaching for individuals The version most people start withEarned intuition, compressed.

You're already operating at the next level. Go make it undeniable.

Work with me
02Advisory & fractional for teamsEarned intuition, rented by the day.

Senior product leadership on the team, before you can hire it.

Start a conversation
03FrameworksEarned intuition, written down.

The reps, written down.

Read the frameworks
In their words

The leader’s read

“Brian is the best judge of people I’ve worked with in my recruiting career. He’d sit with a candidate and see potential the résumé hadn’t earned yet, commit to growing it, then take genuine responsibility for that person’s success long after the hire.”
Jack Feng · Talent Acquisition Partner, Nike Greater China

The coaching read

“He told me the truth: my résumé, portfolio, and LinkedIn were telling three different stories. By the end of our first real session I had a lane, a strategy, and a version of my story I could actually stand behind.”
Dean Davis · Marketing Ops to Product

For hiring teams

Open to leading a product org, full-time.

For the right team and a real mandate, I am open to a senior product leadership role. The work above is the track record. The résumé is the short version.

View résumé

Start with the thinking.The frameworks are the free version of the work, published in the open one rep at a time. They are the fastest way to tell whether we think alike.

The call comes fast. Let's do the homework together.