MIKE LITMAN

AI & Product Innovation Strategist

I help businesses turn emerging technology into products, propositions and stories people understand and want to use.

Product Marketing · Positioning · GTM · AI Product Development

← builder, AI-native, curator

I’ve spent 15+ years at the intersection of strategy, product innovation, marketing and emerging technology, helping organisations work out what new capabilities mean for their business, who they’re useful for, how to position them and how to take them to market.

I’ve done that for Google, Nike, adidas, Netflix, Meta, P&G, Gucci and more, across MediaMonks, R/GA, Contagious, Dare and Poke.

At Contagious, I learned to spot what was coming and explain why it mattered commercially. At R/GA, I worked on product strategy and go-to-market, including Magic Leap’s consumer-to-enterprise pivot. At MediaMonks, I built a global emerging technology capability from zero, spanning positioning, service design and go-to-market, growing it to $3.2M in revenue.

AI has enabled me to take that further.

I don’t have to stop at the research, strategy, positioning or launch narrative. I can prototype products, agents and workflows myself, see what works in the real world, and use what I learn to make the product and proposition better.

Since late 2025, I’ve built 30+ live AI products and experiments across voice agents, cultural intelligence, data, consumer products and automated workflows.

That’s where I’m most useful: close enough to the technology to understand what’s possible, close enough to the customer to understand what matters, and able to find the use case, positioning, proposition and story that connects the two.

Hello!

Product Marketing AI Products BIMA 100 London Published Author

Right now

Building 30+ live AI products and experiments

Exploring Where conversational agents find their strongest use cases

Reading Curation by Michael Bhaskar

Listening The Pattern (daily culture intelligence)

The Writing

Start with this one

Essay · 5 min read Creative Strategists Can Build Now: AI Collapsed the Conveyor Belt “When the making is abundant, the deciding is the scarce thing.” Read it →

Start here: nine posts to read first → All posts

The Proof

Three products, from problem to market

Each one started the same way: find a real problem, work out where AI is genuinely useful, turn it into a proposition, build it, put it in front of people and learn from what happens.

Buggy Smart

Conversational agents in the real world

Parents can’t tell whether a café or restaurant will fit a buggy, and nobody publishes the answer. So I built Poppy, an ElevenLabs voice agent that phones venues and asks. 10,000+ calls later, 1,200+ London venues are mapped and ranked by borough.

What I learned Voice agents aren’t only for answering the phone. Pointed outwards, they become a research instrument that collects data no website has.

See the project →

The Pattern

AI audio as a product

Too many sources, not enough time. The Pattern reads 150+ feeds, synthesises what matters and publishes it as a podcast narrated in my cloned voice, every weekday morning, without me touching it. 200+ episodes so far.

What I learned The value isn’t more content, it’s a better editorial filter. One person with the right tools and taste can run what used to need a newsroom.

See the project →

Beat the Gaffer

A consumer product with a live audience

A free-to-play Premier League prediction game fronted by the Gaffer, an AI character who makes his own picks and owns his howlers. Full-stack: scoring, leagues, notifications, emails and analytics, run week in, week out with a real audience and a business partner.

What I learned Features are easy to copy. Character isn’t. The Gaffer’s voice is why people come back, so that’s where the product effort goes.

See the project →

Voice AI

AI that makes real phone calls

Four different jobs for a conversational agent, each tested on real phone lines: recommending, measuring, answering and researching. Most AI portfolios are text and images. This is voice AI doing useful work in the real world.

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First Order

AI calls London restaurants to find the one dish you have to order. Every other guide tells you where to eat.

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The Queue Index

AI calls London’s best no-reservation restaurants to ask how long the wait is, and turns the answers into a weekly leaderboard. If there’s no queue, is it even good?

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With Moshi

An AI receptionist for independent UK restaurants that answers in the caller’s language, so no booking call goes unanswered during service.

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Buggy Smart

AI calls London venues to ask the pushchair question no listing answers. 10,000+ calls, 1,200+ venues mapped. Research as infrastructure.

voice agents calling real phones → real data London, mapped → all 7 London projects on one map

“

In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.

Paul Graham

Years in product & innovation

Live AI products

$3.2M+

Revenue built from zero

(Media.Monks)

Book published

∞

Tabs open

Lines of code

Keynote AdWorld 2024

Recognition BIMA 100 Tech Pioneer

Recognition 30 Most Creative, Business Insider

Speaker NFT NYC · Google x Monks

Author Published 2024

LinkedIn 26,000+ Followers

The Pattern

Listen now

Fashion's creative director carousel is spinning faster than ever before.

Tech & Digital Apple dropped App Store commission to 25% in China without announcement fanfare Fashion & Style Alessandro Michele's Valentino debut swaps maximalism for intellectual restraint post-Garavani death Tech & Digital ByteDance secured NVIDIA's latest AI chips for international use despite export restrictions Brand & Business Ships near Strait of Hormuz broadcast Chinese ownership signals to avoid Iran attacks Fashion & Style Estée Lauder sues Jo Malone personally over her Zara fragrance collaboration name Tech & Digital Apple dropped App Store commission to 25% in China without announcement fanfare Fashion & Style Alessandro Michele's Valentino debut swaps maximalism for intellectual restraint post-Garavani death Tech & Digital ByteDance secured NVIDIA's latest AI chips for international use despite export restrictions Brand & Business Ships near Strait of Hormuz broadcast Chinese ownership signals to avoid Iran attacks Fashion & Style Estée Lauder sues Jo Malone personally over her Zara fragrance collaboration name

The Clients

Brands I've worked on

NIKE

Google

NETFLIX

GUCCI

BMW

Places I've worked

Monks Sr Director, Brand & Innovation Strategy 2019–2025 the big one

Poke Strategist 2011 where craft lived

Digital Frontier Innovation Director 2025

Dare Strategist 2010 digital was new & exciting

AnalogFolk Strategist 2012

R/GA Strategy Director 2019

Contagious Head of Digital 2017–2019

Burst Founder. Micro-content agency. Acquired. 2013–2017 my first build →

Earlier builds

Brandsonvine · Remote Palette · KingCube

What People Say

From people I've worked with

“Michael is a rare combination of highly-driven expertise and calm, easy-to-work-with attitude. He has a real affinity for the digital space and is able to follow real human insights as well as following the money. Creatively and technically skilled. Top bloke.”

Conor McNicholas

via LinkedIn

“Michael is an entrepreneurial, creative, detail-orientated business operator. Much more multi-faceted now. Hire him.”

Gabbi Cahane

via LinkedIn

“Mike is an extremely likeable, creative and nimble media exec and entrepreneur. Always a pleasure to deal with.”

Daniel Fisher

via LinkedIn

“Loveable Geek.”

Nick Emmel

via LinkedIn

41 recommendations on LinkedIn

Presentations

The talks

click any to view full deck

The Strategist Who Ships

The Last Unfair Advantage

The Non-Coder's Manifesto

Generalists Are Having Their Revenge

All 20 decks →

The Work

Things I've built

Flagship Modern Retro 100 brands × 1970s storefronts. 857 images generated.
AI-generated nostalgia that people actually buy. this one went viral ↗ The Pattern Culture briefing and podcast. 150+ sources curated into one editorial voice. Published every weekday, fully automated. flagship build ★ CultureTerminal A Bloomberg Terminal for culture. 140+ sources, 800+ articles scored daily across fashion, brands, design, music, art and tech. runs itself daily ↻ Automated Trove Save links. See your taste mapped. AI analyses every save to build your personal taste profile. personal favourite ★ Little London 160+ weekend activities for London families. 8 categories. Updated daily via automated pipeline. built for my son Taste OS Score any brand's taste across 5 dimensions. 20 pre-scored brands. Interactive scorer built in. taste as a system Live · Premier League 26/27 Beat the Gaffer A football prediction game fronted by a comic character. Predict the scores, climb the table, beat the Gaffer. Live with a real audience and a business partner. the character is the product ↗

Trove

Personal taste engine. Save links, AI summaries, semantic search, and a profile that reveals what you collect.

Oishii London

84 Japanese restaurants in London. Curated, mapped, verified.

First Out

259 stations. 11 lines. Platform positioning for every stop on the tube.

Queue Index

AI calls London's no-res restaurants. Every Saturday. Live data.

Buggy Smart

1,200+ London venues mapped for pushchair access. 10,000+ AI calls.

First Order

AI calls London restaurants. One must-order dish each.

EVERYWEAR

Wearable tech news. 55+ sources. Automated daily digest.

Pub Guide

114 London pubs. Curated by neighbourhood. Updated daily.

The Visible Shelf

295 books. Cover art, pull-quotes, audio takes.

Nihongo

Japanese learning app. 4 levels, 5 study modes, spaced repetition.

Sociology of Capitalism

74 brands scored twice daily. Cultural relevance vs business performance.

The Relevance Index

1,203 brands. 5 scoring dimensions. Weekly automated pipeline with AI insights.

See all projects filtered →

Cultural Forecast

What's moving this week

W/C 12 October 2026 · Full forecast →

Rising

↑

Culture

Analogue Loyalty Cards Making Ironic Comeback

Coffee shops in Peckham and Hackney are ditching digital stamp apps for paper cards again. Not nostalgia. Anti-surveillance theatre. Customers want a transaction that doesn't feed a data profile.

Fading

↓

Brand

DTC Brands Bragging About Supply Chain

Every challenger brand spent 2023 and 2024 putting their factory on Instagram. It worked once. Now it reads like a desperation move. Consumers have stopped rewarding transparency theatre.

Watch

→

Food

Japanese Convenience Store Format Hits UK High Streets

It's not just Ichiran and Wagamama anymore. The konbini format, quality ready food plus useful retail in a small footprint, is being trialled by two separate London operators this autumn. This could reshape the meal deal entirely.

Peak

⊙

Media

CEO Vulnerability Content On LinkedIn

The confessional founder post peaked around 2024 and has been running on fumes since. Burnout admissions, therapy references, the weeping in the car park anecdote. The format is now a trust signal for nothing. It signals self-promotion dressed as self-awareness.

Going Deeper

Featured case studies

The Relevance Index

Can you score culture?

1,203 brands scored on cultural relevance using Wikipedia, Reddit, and AI. Updated weekly. What started as a spreadsheet became a live index.

The insight The brands with the highest cultural scores rarely have the highest market caps. Cultural relevance and commercial success follow different curves.

See the project →

CultureTerminal

A Bloomberg Terminal for culture

140+ sources and 800+ articles a day across fashion, brands, design, music, art and tech, scored by a custom algorithm so the stories that matter rise to the top.

The insight Everyone in advertising says they’re plugged in to culture. Most are reading the same three newsletters. Staying close to culture is a filtering problem, and one ranked page beats a dozen tabs.

See the project →

Taste OS

What if taste had a score?

A framework for measuring the unmeasurable. 5 dimensions, 100 points, zero subjectivity theatre. Used to score 35+ brands from Aesop to Temu.

The insight Every brand claims to have good taste. Almost none can define what that means. The framework forces precision where vagueness usually hides.

See the project →

How I Think

Beliefs

Taste is the last unfair advantage

When everyone can build, what you choose to build becomes the differentiator.

Build for yourself first

If you are not the user, you are guessing.

Curiosity compounds

The more you notice, the more you see. Go deep on the edges and the centre makes more sense.

Connect the dots others miss

Insight is pattern recognition across worlds.

Curation is a creative act

Choosing what to include and what to leave out defines the work.

Show it early

A working anything beats explanation.

AI is a taste amplifier

It doesn't replace judgment. It gives judgment more surface area.

Status is a signal system

Objects, brands, and interfaces are coded language. Learn the grammar.

All brands compete for cultural capital

Power comes from being culturally fluent, not just commercially present.

Always archive the signal

What you collect, track, and document becomes future capital.

Off the Clock

Beyond the build

⚽

Nottingham Forest. Lifelong, deep, part of who I am. Every Saturday, 3pm. Non-negotiable.

🍜

London's variety in art, culture, shopping and entertainment is my favourite thing about this city. I love sushi, magazine and design shops, hype and streetwear shops, art galleries and finding new places and spaces.

☕

Hot chocolate, not coffee. Caffeine doesn't agree with me. Yes, really.

🌃

Night owl. One kid. Builds between 9pm and midnight.

📚

Currently obsessed with: Claude Code, Nottingham Forest, and building The Pattern: a daily culture briefing from 150+ sources.

Inspired by

Artists & Filmmakers

David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Wes Anderson, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, David Shrigley

Writers & Thinkers

Pierre Bourdieu, Alain de Botton, W David Marx, Michael Bhaskar, Luke Burgis, Emily Sundberg, Jason Kottke, Kyle Chayka, Dan Ariely

Culture & Strategy

Marcus Collins, Bobby Kim, Sahil Bloom, Ethan Mollick, Kevin Kelly, Ana Andjelic, Noah Brier, Richard Huntington

Visionaries

Iain Tait, Virgil Abloh, Nils Leonard, Pharrell, Michael Acton Smith, Alex Tew, Daniel Ek, Shigeru Miyamoto

The Wildcards

Brian Clough, Michael Cera, Daniel Taylor, Rob Saunders, Pete Cashmore, Harry Stebbings, Danny Wallace, Dave Gorman

Works In Progress, i-D, Dazed, WIRED, Monocle, The Face, Wallpaper*, Courier, Colossus, Mundial, Highsnobiety, Hypebeast, 72 Magazine

the syllabus, basically

What's next

Open to product marketing, AI product and advisory roles, permanent or consulting, based in London. Helping businesses turn emerging technology into products, propositions and stories people understand and want to use.

Since late 2025 I’ve built 30+ live AI products and experiments: voice agents, cultural intelligence, data, consumer products and automated workflows. I know what this technology can actually do, where it breaks, and how to explain it to the people who’ll use it and buy it.

Close enough to the technology to understand what’s possible. Close enough to the customer to understand what matters. Then finding the use case, proposition and story that connects the two.

Email me Connect on LinkedIn See the code on GitHub

↑ let's talk