Your PM tool
doesn’t know who
is on your team.
Your product model works. And you’re still shipping slower than the teams with creators. That gap is widening.
productcreator.ai helps CPOs running modern product orgs find, cultivate, and deploy their product creators — before the velocity gap becomes a problem you have to explain to your board. Start with people. Then connect them to vision, strategy, and the outcomes that actually ship.
Six founding design partner spots open. I’ll reach out personally.
You’re doing product right — and you’re still getting outpaced. The difference is creators.
Your teams run discovery, ship outcomes, and do product the way the books say you should. And yet the board keeps asking why a competitor launched a new product in a weekend. You don’t have a clean answer, because the answer isn’t in your process.
One or two people on every high-performing team are doing the lion’s share of the shaping — making calls, cutting scope, writing the prompt, closing the loop with the customer. The rest are executing. You can feel it in 1:1s. You can’t see it in any tool.
Ask a CPO to list the five people on the team who are actually creators — humans who can take an ambiguous problem, shape a solution, and ship something customers love — and you get a careful silence. The ones who could become creators? Even harder. You’re flying blind on the single biggest lever you have.
Every month the bar moves. Teams with one strong creator are shipping what used to take a trio a quarter. The orgs without that capability are doing everything right and still falling behind — and by the time it shows up in the numbers, it’s expensive to fix.
Resources → Teams → Creators.
The role of a person on a product team has transformed twice in twenty years — and is transforming again. The name keeps changing. The question underneath doesn’t: what can this specific human actually do?
- 012000sResourcesProject model
“How many FTEs do we need for this project?”
People were interchangeable units of capacity — headcount, allocations, hours on a plan. Success meant delivery. Whether the thing worked was somebody else’s problem.
- 022010s →TeamsProduct model
“Who owns this outcome?”
Cagan and SVPG drilled in the product model over a decade: empowered cross-functional teams, continuous discovery, outcomes over output. People stopped being filled seats and started being owners of problems. A huge chunk of the industry absorbed the vocabulary. Fewer absorbed the model.
- 032024 →CreatorsProduct creator era
“Who can actually shape product?”
Generative AI put capability in everyone’s hands, so team structure alone no longer decides what ships. The zoom goes back to individuals — but not as resources. As specific humans whose product sense, competencies, and craft can be evidenced. In Cagan’s framing, creators can do the work. Everyone else is exposed.
We are here
People are the constant of every transformation. What changes is what we measure about them. Resource-era orgs measured allocation. Product-era orgs measured team ownership. Creator-era orgs measure evidence of individual capability — which is why the first layer of productcreator.ai is a competency map built from what people have done, not what they call themselves.
I spent nine years running product through exactly this arc — from the project-era tail end into product-model maturity, the last four as CPO. productcreator.ai is the operating system I needed then, and the one every product org will need for the next shift.
The era of the product creator framing comes from Marty Cagan and Bob Baxley’s essay at SVPG. If the arc above resonates, their piece is the source — go read the original.
Read Cagan & BaxleySee the gap. Then close it. Start with people.
The full vision is an operating system for the whole product org. The first two layers that ship are both about the creator gap: one for individuals who want to see their own, one for managers who need to see their team’s.
The creator self-assessment.
An evidence-based view of your own product-creator capability across the dimensions that actually matter: problem shaping, discovery craft, scope judgment, outcome thinking. Shareable with colleagues. Free forever.
- Personal radar
- Peer assessments
- Growth paths
- Shareable
The team dashboard.
Aggregated creator capability across your team, tracked over time with deltas. Where the gap is. Who’s growing. Who’s stalling. What to do about it. This is the layer founding design partners shape first.
- Team aggregate
- Time-series
- Deltas
- Benchmarking
- Growth plans
- Hiring rubric
- Direction
- Vision
- Principles
- Strategy
- Outcomes
- Outcome tracking
- Progress
- Outcome roadmap
- Signal
- Customer interviews
- Discovery
- Feedback loops
Six founding spots. Shape the manager tier.
Design partners shape the manager tier — the team dashboard, the time-series model, the growth planning flow — while v0.1 is still malleable. I’m taking six CPOs or VPs of Product into the founding cohort. Choosy about who takes the spots.
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Logos appear once design partners approve public listing.
- Shape the manager tier — team dashboard, time-series model, deltas, growth planning
- Whole-team rollout of the self-assessment first, before it opens to the public
- A standing channel to me, with a feedback loop measured in hours
- Founding pricing locked in for life once we open general access
I’m Jirka Helmich. I spent nine years at Mews, the last four as Chief Product Officer, working through the hypergrowth years of one of Europe’s fastest-growing product companies.
Everything I know about running product at scale — the competencies that actually matter, the outcomes worth tracking, and the operating model that holds it all together — I learned in those nine years. I’m an SVPG practitioner by necessity first, and by belief now.
productcreator.ai is the operating system I wished I could have bought. I’m building it because I’ve seen up close what it costs a product org to scale without one. Based in Prague.
A downloadable framework for mapping product team capability — the one productcreator.ai is built around — is in the works.
Releasing with the founding design partner cohort. The whitepaper will be free.