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David Hawley

I take digital products from vague idea to live and used.

20 years owning the whole journey: discovery, UX, architecture, delivery. Strongest where digital serves a physical experience. Now shipping AI products at Eleo Studio.

Open to Head of Product, Product Director and founding product roles: something new to define, or a live product to own and grow. London, hybrid or remote. Available within a week.

Four builds, shipped

My own products, discovery through to production. Twenty years in, I still do the work myself.

  1. Deucey

    Apple Watch + iPhonePadel scoring that gets out of the way of the game.

    Four players, one score, and nobody sure if it's 30-40 or 40-30. Every argument about the score is a rally not played.

    I own it end to end: the product spec, 25 user journeys, the design system and the Swift build across watch, phone and a shared rules engine. You score from the wrist without looking. The phone calls the score out to the court in a real umpire's voice, so all four players keep their heads in the point.

    Deucey on Apple Watch: 40-30 in the first set, our score in ball yellow on the near side of the net, serve dot by the server
    Deucey on iPhone: the live match screen at 40-15, golden point scoring, game point to us
    Deucey setup: choosing the umpire voice, off, key points only, or every point
    • Eyes on the ball

      Score with the crown, a swipe or a double tap, without looking. A distinct haptic tells you whose point went in. A single tap never scores, so a sweaty wrist can't change the match.

    • The court hears the score

      Every point called through the phone or a Bluetooth speaker: deuce, golden point, set point, tiebreaks. 196 recorded clips, each checked by speech-to-text before it shipped.

    • Either hand, either wrist

      It detects which wrist the watch is on and which side the crown sits, then maps every gesture so the near side of the net is always your point. A manual flip covers the edge cases.

    • Never drops a point

      Each point is an event on an append-only log, so nothing gets overwritten. The watch keeps scoring if the phone drops out, and they reconcile the moment it's back. Undo and correct in one swipe.

    • Real padel rules

      Golden point, the new star point, advantage, tiebreaks and super tiebreaks, all set before the first serve. Props in landscape as a courtside scoreboard, readable from the baseline.

    • A little banter

      Ten lines tied to real moments in the match: a third game on the bounce, a bagel on the cards, a tiebreak. Never the same line twice in a day.

    Hear the umpire

    Commits
    145
    Rules-engine test coverage
    90%
    Voice clips, all verified
    196
    User journeys specced
    25
    • SwiftUI
    • watchOS
    • WatchConnectivity
    • SwiftData
    • ElevenLabs
    • Swift 6
  2. Domestique

    Weekend buildAn agentic cycling trip planner.

    Planning a multi-day ride means juggling routes, gradients, daylight and where to sleep across a dozen tabs.

    Ran the discovery, designed the agent loop, built it. It turns a rough ambition into a day-by-day tour: routes, bike-friendly stays, weather, cafe stops. LLM-as-judge eval suite behind it.

    • Claude API
    • Python
    • FastAPI
    • Streamlit
    • Domestique planning a multi-day tour in real time
    • Domestique landing page: 'Your cycling concierge. So you can just ride.' with a plan-your-trip prompt
    • The concierge asking clarifying questions about daily distance and trip length before planning
    • A generated plan with per-day GPX route downloads, total ascent and notable climbs
  3. Eleo Jobs

    In daily useA white-labelled recruitment engine.

    Job boards return hundreds of near-misses and no sense of which roles are actually worth a reply.

    Built and shipped a recruitment engine, then white-labelled it as a product: it pulls roles, scores each against a profile with an LLM, and ranks a shortlist with the reasoning attached. I run my own job hunt through it.

    • Claude API
    • TypeScript
    • Next.js
    • Postgres
    Eleo Jobs dashboard: 74 roles tracked, 11 awaiting reply, 3 interviewing, 1 offer, with an LLM-scored shortlist showing match percentages and apply actions
  4. VeloLog

    macOS + KarooA native training app, Mac to head unit.

    Structured indoor training means a subscription, a closed ecosystem and someone else's idea of a workout.

    Built a native macOS training app in SwiftUI: ERG-mode structured workouts driven over ANT+, live power, cadence and torque, then deep post-ride analysis: mean-maximal-power curves, time in zone and a FIT export. It also runs on the bike, a companion Hammerhead Karoo app in Kotlin with custom on-device data fields.

    • SwiftUI
    • Swift
    • ANT+
    • FIT
    • Kotlin
    • Karoo SDK
    • Workout builder with a structured Sweet Spot session and its interval breakdown
    • Post-ride review: power, cadence and torque traces with summary metrics
    • Sprint analysis: mean maximal power curve, peak-power stats and time in zone

How I work

  1. Discover

    Structured workshops and user interviews to find the real problem before a line of code.

  2. Prototype

    A working slice in days, in front of real users, to learn what the spec missed.

  3. Ship

    Own it through to production. I can write the code as well as the brief, which keeps estimates honest and the team unblocked.

  4. Measure

    Instrument what matters, own the number, then cut and sharpen.

20 years in B2C product

Membership, hospitality and sport: businesses whose real product is a physical experience.

  • Soho HouseCreated their front-of-house product end to end: shadowed the floor, owned the backlog, live across every house. Membership revenue £120m to £300m in five years.
  • The FALed the re-platform of TheFA.com for millions of fans, and kept ticketing standing on sale day. Revenue up £15m a year.
  • Ski Club GBOwned the membership product end to end, signup journey through to retention. Retention up 5%, revenue up over £100k.

Let's talk

Open to Head of Product, Product Director and founding product roles: something new to define, or a live product to own and grow. London, hybrid or remote. Available within a week.

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