# About

## Head of Product. Field discovery. AI in real hands.

Ten years building complex B2B digital products — from DICOM platforms in medical imaging to the internal tools nobody ever photographs for LinkedIn. The kind of products where a bug is expensive, where users are experts, and where the roadmap has to survive three reorganisations.

## What I actually do

I lead product teams in contexts where the code is ten years old, where users are out in the field (not in an open space), and where "adding AI" has to mean something other than gluing a chatbot into a corner of the screen.

My day-to-day looks like this:

- **Field discovery** — not 30-minute Zoom interviews, but full days with users in their real environment. It takes time, it is uncomfortable, and it is the only thing that works.
- **Legacy modernisation** — taking apart a PHP monolith from 2014, understanding why it exists, and transforming it without breaking the 200 customers who depend on it.
- **AI integration into existing products** — identifying the 3 places where an LLM creates real, measurable value, and ignoring the other 47 where it only ticks a roadmap box.

## AI-Augmented Delivery

I have used Claude Code in production since it shipped. Not as a gadget — as a team multiplier. Specs, audits, prototypes, large refactors: the workflow changed, the human decisions did not. This site is built that way. So is `regrets.app`.

AI increases velocity, not product judgement. Knowing when to use it — and when to cut it short — is the whole difference between a team that ships and a team that gets locked inside its own tooling.

## What I don't do

- No armchair product management — no field, no product.
- No roadmap pulled from a Notion template.
- No "we added AI" to please the board.
- No frameworks applied mechanically (RICE, MoSCoW, Jobs-to-be-Done exist to serve the product, not the other way round).

## What I'm looking for now

A large part of my career has been spent handling crisis situations. Not dramatic crises with sirens — rather the everyday reality of many tech companies: a product poorly defined from the start, technical debt ignored for too long, a team reorganised three times in two years, a context where everyone is exhausted and nobody really knows where things are heading.

I know how to do that. But at some point you realise you are spending a lot of energy repairing things that should never have broken.

What I am after now are organisations where leadership trusts product, where teams are allowed to do things properly, and where we are not permanently catching up. Smoother contexts — not simpler, not problem-free, but where the energy goes in the right direction.

## Outside of product

Documentary photography over the long run, experimental music (listening, sometimes playing), permaculture applied to an actual garden, and a lasting interest in political science — because products are never born in a vacuum.

Based in Lille. Mobile across Paris, Belgium and Canada. Open to product transformation engagements, leadership roles, and interesting conversations with no commercial agenda.

[m@mdr.cool](mailto:m@mdr.cool) — [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/mathieudrouet) — [regrets.app](https://regrets.app/)