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
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 — delayed sign-offs, redirection at key junctures. For a while, I tried to work around it. Then I stopped and actually listened to what was being blocked and why.

What I found was that nearly every point of friction traced back to the same root: a culture of fear of failure. Decisions were stalling because people were protecting themselves from being wrong. Once I named that, the conversation shifted entirely.

I introduced a shared frame — a growth and learner's mindset — not as a motivational poster, but as a working agreement: 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
02
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.

The correction: build feedback loops before you build features. Metrics tell you what happened. Developers tell you what's coming.
Product Judgment
03
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 engineers and designers 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.

🏢
2022 — 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
📈
2019 — 2022
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
🏦
2018 — 2019
Digital Product 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.

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

Lucile · Product Leader · Toronto