Dale Miles.
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Thirteen years listening to customers. Now I turn what they tell me into product.

I was one of four people building ThriveCart, a checkout platform that grew to process over $1.5B a year before it was acquired. I owned support and customer content there before moving into product. Today I still wear several hats: research, specification, UX, and the working prototype when a spec needs proving.

See the work → Read my CV

My morning is the US afternoon, so meetings land in the overlap and the rest of the day runs while the US sleeps. I have worked remotely since 2013, and for the last three and a half years with a team spread across the US and Canada. I engage as a contractor, so there is no visa or sponsorship involved, and I can work through whichever platform you already use.

  • Contract directly or through Deel
  • W-8BEN ready
  • USD invoicing paid by ACH
$1.5B+

Pre-acquisition annual GMV on ThriveCart, the checkout platform I worked on for ten years.

7,800+

Legacy users I migrated when I rebuilt TradeSoft, my own marketplace.

95%+

CSAT across tens of thousands of ThriveCart customers, from a two-person desk.

I can write the spec. I can also build the thing it describes.

I write specs and hand them over when that is what the work needs. I can also build the working version first, so stakeholders and testers respond to something real instead of a document. Which one I reach for depends on what gets to a decision faster.

Concept to production ready

I am not a developer. What I am is someone who can use agentic workflows to carry an idea from concept through staging to production, test it by hand and with AI, and then support the people using it. TradeSoft runs on exactly that basis today: real traffic, real money, real support load.

  • Concept and specification
  • Staging, hands-on and AI testing
  • Launch, support and iteration

Working inside your stack

In an established team I am not trying to own the codebase. I use agentic setups to mirror a staging environment and build prototypes that behave the way the real system behaves, which makes the hand-off to development a shorter conversation. Where the backend can wait, something like Figma Make puts the idea in front of people sooner.

  • Prototypes that match your stack
  • Figma Make when the backend can wait
  • A shorter hand-off to development

The whole flow, or any part of it

Research, planning, customer conversations, UX, UI and release QA. I can run the full line when a team is small, and in a bigger one I own my piece, hand each section to whoever owns it, and pick the work back up when it comes round. Being able to work alone is a useful gear, not a preference.

  • Research through to release QA
  • Hands off cleanly, picks back up
  • Works to whoever owns the piece

Roadmaps built from real tickets

A decade reading what tens of thousands of customers were confused by, fed back into training, documentation and the product. The research still happens, it just starts closer to the answer, because I have usually watched people break a flow long before it reaches a roadmap.

QA the way a real user does it

Structured test plans catch what the spec said would happen, and they matter. Alongside them I go at a release the way a customer would, then deliberately try to break it: wrong data, wrong order, the path nobody wrote a case for. That is where the issues that end up in support tend to be hiding.

One product I helped build. One I built on my own.

The ThriveCart homepage, showing revenue processed and active sellers

ThriveCart, 2013 to 2026

Four people, and a platform that moved $1.5B a year.

A conversion-focused, funnel-based checkout platform for SMEs and course creators. I was one of the four people who built it, covering support, documentation, video and community before moving into product. It was acquired in 2022 and I stayed another three and a half years as it grew to around 200 people, so I have run product both in a team of four and across a company with departments, handovers and competing roadmaps.

$1.5B+annual GMV pre-acquisition
4people building it
200+staff after the acquisition
Read the case study → Visit thrivecart.com →
TradeSoft on the App Store, with product screens and a monthly active users chart

TradeSoft, 2016 to now

Built it. Sold it. Bought it back. Rebuilt it.

A peer-to-peer marketplace I launched in 2016 and sold in 2022. It sat unchanged after that, so when I left ThriveCart I bought it back and rebuilt it on an entirely new stack, in the direction I had wanted to take it originally. Concept to production on my own, including carrying 7,800 legacy accounts across with their trading history intact.

$140k+P2P sales in three months
1,500+monthly active users
7,800+accounts migrated
Read the case study → Visit tradesoft.app →

Thirteen years, one deep specialism.

Long tenures inside small teams building B2B eCommerce SaaS, plus two businesses of my own. The full version lives on the CV.

  1. Jun 2026 to nowNew Zealand

    Founder and Operator

    TradeSoftOwn business

    Bought AirsoftTrader back and relaunched it as TradeSoft on an entirely new stack, in the direction I had wanted to take it originally. Concept to production on my own: research, scoping, UX, UI, build and release QA, plus migrating 7,800+ legacy users across with their history intact.

  2. Dec 2024 to May 2026Austin, TX, remote

    Product Manager

    ThriveCart

    Moved from the support side of the product into owning it. PRDs and user stories, prototyping, release QA, and product decisions grounded in a decade of direct customer contact. Product specialist for ThriveCart and ConvertBox.

  3. Nov 2022 to Dec 2024Austin, TX, remote

    Senior Technical Support, founding member

    ThriveCart

    The escalation point for issues nobody else could reproduce, and I raised them in a product-focused way: the fault, a suggested solution, and often a worked example of how it could behave. Deep investigation into reported faults, replicating them inside ThriveCart and across the third-party stack customers ran on, from autoresponders and membership platforms to Zapier and Make.com.

  4. Jun 2013 to Nov 2022New Zealand

    Head of Content and Customer Support

    WebActix: ThriveCart, EasyVideoSuite, Audello

    Owned support and all customer-facing content across several SaaS platforms serving tens of thousands of users. Built knowledge bases from scratch in written and video form, ran communities of 10,000+ members, tracked refund and churn patterns, and worked alongside development replicating bugs in live and staging environments.

  5. 2016 to 2022New Zealand

    Founder and Operator

    AirsoftTraderOwn business

    This was product management before I had the title. I ran the research, scoping, UX, UI and testing, contracted out the development, and kept iterating the features on customer feedback after release. Built to fill the gap a Facebook policy change left behind, and grown to more than 100,000 page views a month, then sold in 2022. I bought it back in 2026, now TradeSoft.

  6. 2017 to 2019New Zealand

    Founder and Operator

    SmokeGrenadesOwn business

    A niche eCommerce business run solo at an average 40% profit margin. Growth came from a segment well outside the original target market: wedding and gender-reveal photographers. Sourcing, branding, paid social, conversion-focused landing pages, and dangerous-goods compliance. Closed when regulation changed.

What I actually use.

Highlighted items are the ones I am hands-on with right now, mostly on TradeSoft.

Product and delivery

  • Roadmapping
  • PRDs and user stories
  • Spec writing
  • Churn and refund analysis
  • User interviews
  • Stakeholder management
  • Prototyping

QA and investigation

  • Release QA
  • Issue replication
  • Bug logging and triage
  • Regression testing
  • Edge-case hunting
  • Support-pattern analysis

Integrations

  • REST APIs and webhooks
  • Payment gateways
  • Zapier
  • Make.com
  • Autoresponders
  • Membership platforms

Build

  • Agentic coding
  • Supabase
  • JavaScript
  • HTML and CSS
  • WordPress
  • BigCommerce
  • Cloudflare

Content and growth

  • Knowledge bases
  • Video production
  • Community management
  • Paid social
  • SEO
  • Lifecycle email

Day to day

  • Jira
  • Confluence
  • GitHub
  • Zendesk
  • Claude
  • Premiere Pro
  • Photoshop
  • AI-assisted workflows

What people I’ve worked with say.

Dale has exceptional knowledge of the ThriveCart platform and its underlying behaviours. He has become a trusted reference point for how ThriveCart works end to end.

GK
George KartakisHead of Payments, ThriveCart

Just wanted to thank you for all the fantastic and detailed responses you share with the team again and again. Some of the gears of the machine kind of elude me.

AB
Arthur BubansSenior Customer Success Manager, ThriveCart

Compared to the uninspired replies and buck-passing I’ve seen with so many other apps, getting this kind of dedicated support is truly a breath of fresh air.

TC
ThriveCart customerName withheld
Dale Miles
Dale MilesProduct Manager, Tauranga NZ

Let’s talk.

I’m looking for product roles at SMEs and startups that want someone close to the customer who can build as well as specify.