Most PMs guess what users want. I've spent 13 years being told.
Founding team member on a checkout platform processing over $1B in GMV a year, where I owned the entire customer-facing surface: support, documentation, video, community. Now I turn what users actually struggle with into shipped product. And when a spec needs proving, I build the working version myself.
Three things that make me a different kind of PM.
None of these are things I read about. They're what thirteen years in a four-person team actually taught me.
Roadmaps built from real tickets
I spent a decade reading what tens of thousands of customers were confused by, then feeding those patterns back into training, docs and the product itself. I don't need a research round to tell me where a flow breaks. I've watched people break it.
I ship the prototype, not the deck
TradeSoft's web and mobile apps were built end to end with agentic coding. When a spec is ambiguous, I'd rather hand you something clickable on Friday than argue about a wireframe for a fortnight.
QA the way a real user does it
Test suites find spec violations. I find what a tired customer does at 11pm with the wrong data in the wrong field. Years of niche, unintended platform usage means I break things the way your users will.
Products I've owned, not just contributed to.
Built it. Sold it. Bought it back. Rebuilt it.
TradeSoft is a peer-to-peer marketplace I originally launched in 2016, sold in 2022, then repurchased and relaunched in 2026 on an entirely new stack, carrying every legacy user across with their history intact. Full lifecycle ownership: concept, spec, build, migration, launch, growth.
ThriveCart & the four-person team
Founding member of a checkout platform serving tens of thousands of SMEs and processing over $1B in GMV annually, where four people delivered what most companies staff at forty. Covering publicly shipped features, the support-to-roadmap loop, and the knowledge base I built from zero.
Case study coming soon
Thirteen years, one deep specialism.
Long tenures inside small teams building B2B eCommerce SaaS, plus two businesses of my own, run end to end.
Product Manager
Moved from the support side of the product into owning it. PRD and user story writing, prototyping, release QA, and product decisions grounded in a decade of direct customer contact. Product specialist for both ThriveCart and ConvertBox, working AI-assisted across research, specification and prototyping.
Senior Technical Support · Founding member
The escalation point for issues nobody else could reproduce. Deep investigation into reported faults, replicating them not only inside ThriveCart but across the third-party stack our customers ran on — autoresponders, membership and course platforms, Zapier, Make.com — then writing bug reports engineering could act on, with steps, scope and impact. Logged in GitHub, later Jira. Alongside that: internal process and training documentation, onboarding of new support staff, customer-facing content, and pre-release feature testing. Identified user-driven issues through niche platform usage that structured test plans routinely missed.
Head of Content & Customer Support
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 social communities of 10,000+ members, tracked refund and churn patterns, and worked alongside development replicating and diagnosing bugs across live and staging environments.
Founder & Operator
Built a classifieds marketplace to fill a gap left by a platform policy change. Grew it to ~3,000 monthly actives and 100,000+ monthly page views, self-taught CSS to build a custom theme, then specified and contracted out a feedback system, private messaging, and an improved user dashboard, later selling those plugins to other operators. Sold the business in 2022, repurchased and relaunched it in 2026.
Founder & Operator
Niche eCommerce business run solo at an average 40% profit margin. Found growth by identifying an unexpected segment well outside the original target market: wedding and gender-reveal photographers. Handled sourcing, branding, paid social, conversion-focused landing pages, dangerous-goods compliance and shipping. Closed when regulation changed.
Video producer & content creator
Storyboarding, graphics, animation and production for SaaS sales videos, including A/B test variants. Involved in the pre-launch content for a product that did seven figures on day one. Games Art & Design foundation degree, Norwich University of the Arts.
What I actually use.
Product & delivery
QA & investigation
Integrations
Build
Content & growth
Day to day
What people I've worked with say.
Dale has exceptional knowledge of the ThriveCart platform and its underlying behaviours, far exceeding what would typically be expected at his current career stage in product. He has become a trusted reference point for how ThriveCart works end to end. Teams regularly rely on him for answers and support due to his dependability and willingness to help, even when the work sits outside his formal responsibilities.
Just wanted to drop by to thank you for all the fantastic and detailed responses you share with the team again and again. I really appreciate it, as some of the gears of the machine kind of elude me.
Every support ticket I've sent in, every post I've made on the FB group has been met with a thorough and thoughtful reply from one of the support team (usually Dale Miles – rockstar!). Compared to the desultory, 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.
Let's talk.
I'm looking for product roles with SMEs and startups who want someone adaptable, close to the customer, and able to build as well as specify.
- ✉ dale@dalemiles.com
- in linkedin.com/in/dale-miles
- ◷ New Zealand, working US hours