Hi, I’m Sam.
I’m a Lead Product Strategist at Amdocs Studios. For the past two years I’ve led product strategy for one client, DreamWorks Animation, on the platform its artists use to find, manage and reuse their work.
Building my own apps is how I learn what designing with AI can really do. I make the ones I wish existed and ones for real people with real problems, and I get to own every part of the experience (for better or for worse). Explore a few below.
Client work 19
B2B 9
Consumer 6
Health 5
Public and nonprofit 3
Client work
At DreamWorks Animation, finding an asset went from 15–30 minutes to seconds
As Lead Product Strategist at Amdocs Studios, I led DreamWorks Animation’s asset-management suite from discovery through launch.
<1 sec to search video in the AI pilot, down from more than 10 seconds.
I moved the team from reacting to feature requests to deciding what to build from what artists actually do.
“Transformed the way they do engineering… designing for the needs of their creators instead of iterative guesswork.”VP of Engineering, DreamWorks Animation
I also created internal evals for benchmarking video search, so animators can find reusable clips.
Side projects
Beacon turns everything I save into reading, agent tasks and a library I can search
- An AI-assisted Mac app, in active development, in two halves: Triage for bookmarks and starred repos, Library for pictures.
- Every save ends at Pass, Read or Do. Triage passes the noise, sends the reading to Readwise Reader, and turns a Do into a brief for Claude Code or Codex that runs only after I press Enter.
- Library began as Mosaic, after working on asset search at DreamWorks Animation made me wonder what a consumer version would feel like. It finds pictures by meaning and by visual similarity.
- More about Beacon →
Every save needs a project and a next step, or a reason to let it go.
Side projects
Notebook tells me who’s waiting on a reply, so the people I care about don’t drift
- A private personal CRM for Mac and iPhone, in development.
- On the Mac it builds each relationship’s story from my Contacts, Messages, Calendar and Gmail, and draws everyone as a character.
- Replies shows the people waiting on you, one card at a time, and each card leaves toward your choice.
- From Messages it keeps who wrote and when, never what was said.
- More about Notebook →
Small on-device models judge one message far better than they track who owes whom. So the model only says what the last message does, and fixed rules say whose turn that makes it.
Side projects
Kindred gives two people one shared list for groceries, chores and plans
- An iPhone app any two people can share. Its first TestFlight build is in beta review, for invited testers.
- Tap “I’m on it” on a chore and the other phone shows you’ve got it, so nobody does the recycling twice.
- It runs on both phones and the Apple Watch, with iMessage cards in testing. It syncs through iCloud with no server of its own, and has no analytics, ads or tracking.
- More about Kindred →
A check is saved as “done” rather than as a flip, so a late tap from the Apple Watch can’t undo the other person’s check.
Side projects
Margin turns your feedback into your AI’s style guide
- A markdown reader for macOS: highlight in six colours and write margin notes.
- It turns writing corrections into reusable AI instructions.
- A custom evaluation harness tests each change and rejects regressions.
- Download Margin for Apple Silicon Macs →
- More about Margin →
AI keeps getting better at writing, but it still can’t write like me, and there’s no easy way to capture my voice and keep my feedback. In Margin, feedback I give once gets generalized and reused instead of lost.
Side projects
Braille reads papers aloud and waits for questions
- An iOS prototype: a voice-first AI research tool for blind and low-vision experts, built for a retired cardiologist losing his sight.
- Spoken navigation through scientific papers, with answers grounded in the source text.
- Interrupt to ask what something means; it returns to the exact sentence.
- More about Braille →
A retired cardiologist used to read his specialty journals himself, and he is losing his sight.
About Sam
Hi there! I’ve spent about twelve years working at the fuzzy front end of products, where nobody agrees yet on what to build, and helping teams unlock a step change in their product’s growth. Off the clock I love to ski, throw pottery and cook. I’m currently teaching myself piano, so reach out if you have any tips!
What I’ve learned along the way
Away from the desk
Pottery
Surfing
Skiing
Hiking