Available for work, and open to experiences, networking, and brainstorming.

Sam Cusano

I build 0→1 products and the systems underneath them.

Product leader

Fourteen years of this now, across AI, marketplaces, and enterprise software. Usually the brief is fuzzy, the technology has opinions, and everyone has a theory.

My job is to find out whether we’re onto something or just having a very expensive conversation.

What the work added up to.

Here are the receipts.

Revenue impact
$7M+
Design systems built, scaled, or contributed to
7
Companies
8

210

GitHub contributions in the last 12 months

More about me
Featured work

An enterprise billing system. A marketplace revenue rebuild. An AI product from zero to one.

Three very different plots

All 12 studies

Ship early. Let reality decide.

The approach

I’d rather have a bad prototype than a perfect argument.

When a decision gets stuck, I build the smallest thing that makes the disagreement real.

Maybe it breaks. Maybe it works. Either way, we have something real to react to.

So, what do you want to know?

  • Complex product design, mostly 0→1 products and ambitious rebuilds.

    AI workflows, B2B SaaS, marketplaces, and the occasional problem nobody quite knows how to describe yet.

  • A senior or principal IC role building something hard.

    I've led design end to end with PMs and engineers. I've picked up product strategy when PMs leave. I've worked across the fuzzy bit where design becomes a product decision.

  • Usually by asking the annoying question nobody wants to answer yet.

    I kept asking it until the team started asking it without me. That's generally the goal.

  • Sequencing beats capability.

    A model might be able to do ten things. If someone catches your AI being wrong twice, they're thinking, can I trust this thing?

  • Plenty.

    A leaderboard I was convinced would work that made people feel exposed. An MVP I scoped beyond what the timeline could carry.

Sam Cusano