Product Leadership · AI & Design Systems · Toronto

Lucile —
Product
Leader

I bring product and AI thinking to problems that are too big to ignore and too complex for easy answers. Senior Manager of Product Management with a track record of building platform products that reshape how engineering and design teams operate at scale.

$9.2M
Annual Cost Savings
2×
Engineering Velocity
4,500+
Developers Served
200+
Designers on Platform
The Classic Interview

Questions I've been asked.
Answers I actually give.

Real stories. No buzzword-wrapped non-answers.

01
The vision question
"Where do you think AI product is going in the next 2 years?"
The companies that win won't be the ones who moved fastest to ship AI features. They'll be the ones who did the unglamorous work first — cleaning up their data, building the right infrastructure, and fine-tuning for specific use cases rather than bolting on generic LLMs.

The other underrated factor: UI. The next wave of great AI products will be defined as much by interaction design as model performance. That's where I see the real white space — and where I want to build.
AI Vision
02
The exec influence probe
"Tell me about a time you influenced a decision at the executive level."
We had a developer portal generating $40M+ in API revenue, growing double digits year over year — and zero shared governance across 180 APIs. That misalignment was becoming a ceiling on growth.

I designed a workshop that let the C-suite arrive at the answer together. Pre-wired conversations beforehand, then structured the session to make trade-offs visible. The governance framework they adopted wasn't mine. It was theirs. That's the only way decisions at that level actually stick.
Executive Influence
03
Classic opener
"Tell me about a time you worked with someone you found difficult. What did you do about it?"
I had a peer who consistently blocked forward momentum. Rather than work around it, I stopped and listened to what was being blocked and why. Every friction point traced back to the same root: a culture of fear of failure.

I introduced a shared working agreement — a growth and learner's mindset: we're allowed to be wrong early, so we can be right when it counts. It smoothed the relationship and changed how the team made decisions together.
People & Culture
04
The follow-up
"Tell me about a product decision you got wrong."
Early in my platform work, I optimized for adoption metrics over developer experience. We hit our numbers, then watched sentiment quietly erode.

Metrics tell you what happened. Developers tell you what's coming. Now I build feedback loops before I build features.
Product Judgment
05
The leadership probe
"How do you drive alignment across teams you don't control?"
I co-create rather than cascade. With pAIella — an MCP-powered Figma-to-code pipeline — I had 30+ contributors with competing priorities. I brought people into the problem framing, not just the solution review.

People align to things they helped shape. That project won the 2025 Zeroheight Design System Innovation Award.
Influence & Execution
Process & Method

Agile as a mindset,
not a mandate.

I don't apply frameworks wholesale. I adapt them to the team, the problem, and the moment.

🔭
Discover
Start with the problem space, not the backlog. Map assumptions before committing to what to build.
⚡
Sprint & Learn
Short feedback loops, scoped to intent — not ceremony. Retros are diagnostic tools, not theatre.
🎯
Signal over Noise
Qualitative signal tracked alongside metrics. Developer experience is a leading indicator.
🔄
Adapt the System
The framework serves the team, not the other way around. Calibrate cadences to the problem's pace.
🗺️
Roadmapping is a Hypothesis
Living documents with confidence tiers: committed, likely, exploring. Stakeholders read intent, not just dates — fewer surprises, more honest conversations.
🧩
Platform Thinking First
Every decision asks: does this compound value across teams, or just solve locally? Platform products are force multipliers — I build for the ecosystem.
🤝
Shipping is a Team Sport
I coordinate 30+ cross-functional contributors through shared context, not just shared timelines. When people understand the why, the what moves faster.
Career

Where I've been.
What I built there.

A decade across product, AI, and platform — from Paris to Berlin to Toronto.

🏢
2024 — Present
Senior Manager, Product Management
Thomson Reuters · Toronto
Lead two enterprise platform products: Saffron, a design system serving 200+ designers and 2–3K engineers across 50+ products, and an External Developer Portal serving 4,500+ developers across 180+ APIs. Manage 4 direct reports and 30+ cross-functional contributors.

Co-created pAIella — an MCP-powered Figma-to-code AI pipeline that won the 2025 Zeroheight Design System Innovation Award, delivering 2.8× development speed and 64% time savings.
Design SystemsDeveloper ExperienceAI ToolingPlatform Strategy
📈
2022 — 2024
Senior Product Manager
Thomson Reuters · Toronto
Grew from PM to Senior Manager in three years. Owned product roadmaps across enterprise platforms, built cross-functional delivery rhythms, and established developer experience as a first-class product discipline.
Enterprise ProductRoadmappingStakeholder Alignment
🏦
2019 — 2022
Program Manager & Senior Product Marketing Manager
CIBC · Toronto
Delivered digital banking features in a highly regulated, high-stakes environment. Navigated complex stakeholder landscapes across compliance, engineering, and design — building the rigour for enterprise platform work that followed.
FintechRegulated EnvironmentsDigital Banking
🤖
2016 — 2018
Product Manager — AI Search
OpenOil · Berlin
Built Aleph — an ML-powered document search tool for investigative journalists. Early, hands-on work with machine learning applied to real-world information retrieval. The foundation for the AI product perspective I bring today.
Machine LearningSearchEarly-StageBerlin
📰
2014 — 2016
Project & Product Manager
Sourcefabric · Berlin
Open-source publishing tools for newsrooms globally. First deep exposure to developer communities, API ecosystems, and building products for technical audiences — themes that run through every role since.
Open SourcePublishing TechAPIs
🎓
Education
MBA · Digital Transformation
École de Gestion Supérieur Paris · BA Sociology & Architecture, University of Toronto
A deliberately unusual combination: business strategy, social systems thinking, and spatial design. It shapes how I see product — as architecture for human behaviour, not just feature delivery.
MBAParisArchitectureToronto
Workshop Facilitation

Where strategy meets
the room.

I run workshops that move decision-makers from misaligned intuitions to crisp, documented strategies — including with C-suites.

🏛️
API-First Governance Model
C-Suite Workshop · External Developer Portal
Brought together 180 APIs and a fragmented stakeholder map. Ran a structured discovery session with senior executives to align on an API-first philosophy — surfacing hidden assumptions about ownership, versioning, and developer experience. The output was a decision framework the C-suite co-authored and trusted enough to act on immediately.
🎨
Design System Strategy Sprint
Cross-Functional · 200+ Designers, 2–3K Engineers
Facilitated a strategy sprint across 50+ products and 255+ repositories. Used MUST/SHOULD/COULD prioritization to surface genuine trade-offs and build stakeholder conviction — not just buy-in.
🤖
AI Tooling Alignment — pAIella
Engineering + Design Leadership
Led workshops to co-define scope and guardrails for an MCP-powered Figma-to-code pipeline. Navigated concerns about AI quality, compliance, and engineering autonomy — resulting in a controlled test proving 64.2% time savings and 23% higher compliance.
My facilitation process

Every workshop I run follows the same underlying logic, regardless of the audience.

1
Pre-wire, don't ambush
Interview key stakeholders before the room convenes. Understand the fault lines. Know which decisions are actually open.
2
Frame the problem, not the solution
The first 20 minutes are diagnostic. Surface what people believe, not what they want to decide.
3
Create productive tension
Design for constructive disagreement — exercises that make trade-offs visible so people choose deliberately.
4
Close with ownership, not actions
Named owners, a written decision log, and one clearly articulated next decision point.
5
Make the invisible visible
Post-workshop synthesis within 24 hours: decisions made, open questions, and the reasoning behind choices.
Resources

Thinking made
tangible.

Frameworks, workshop artifacts, and AI prompts I've built and use. Grab and go.

🗺️
Workshop Artifact
Developer Dialogue — API Journey Map
A 2hr 20min cross-functional session mapping the full API lifecycle from concept to consumption — surfacing pain points, tool gaps, and quick wins. Includes agenda, journey map template, and wrap-up framework.
Journey MappingAPI GovernanceC-Suite
View artifact →
📋
Framework & Template
Design System Roadmap Workbook
A structured annual planning template for design system PMs — from data source mapping through prioritization, quarterly planning, OKR definition, and north star metrics. Based on the Saffron method.
Design SystemsRoadmappingOKRs
View workbook →
🤖
AI Prompts
3 Prompts for Product Leaders
Production-tested prompts for high-stakes PM work: a buy vs. build deep research prompt, an executive presentation builder, and a business case data synthesizer. Each includes the prompt, variables, and why it works.
AI ToolingDecision MakingExec Communication
View prompts →

"I own the why and the what.
My team owns the how."

Lucile · Product Leader · Toronto