Mike Litman

The thread

I spent 15 years as a Strategy Director at independent and creative agencies in London. Monks, Poke, Dare, AnalogFolk. The good shops, not the holding companies. The places where craft mattered, where you could feel the difference between decent work and great work, and where the people around you cared about that gap.

I was always the one connecting dots that other people didn't see. The overlap between culture, brands, and audiences: that's where the interesting stuff lives. Not in the strategy deck, but in the pattern you notice before anyone else does. Why something feels right. Why a particular moment matters. That instinct shaped every brief I touched.

In late 2024, I discovered Claude Code. Within weeks, I was shipping products. Not wireframes, not prototypes: actual live products that people could use. 14 projects and counting, all built by someone who has never written a line of code from scratch. I'm not a developer. I'm a builder who uses AI as the bridge between an idea and the thing itself.

The thread connecting all of it, the strategy career, the product building, the cultural obsessions, is taste. Curation. Seeing what matters and having the conviction to act on it. Whether I'm shaping a brand strategy or designing a product interface, the skill is the same: pattern recognition with conviction. Knowing what to include, what to leave out, and why.

Principles

1. 01
   Taste is the last unfair advantage
   When everyone can build with AI, what you choose to build becomes the differentiator.
2. 02
   Build for an audience of one
   The best products come from solving your own problems first.
3. 03
   Curation is a creative act
   Choosing what to include (and what to leave out) is the real work.
4. 04
   Show, don't present
   A working product beats a 60-slide deck every time.
5. 05
   Speed beats perfection
   Ship it, learn, iterate. The version that exists beats the version that's perfect.

What's next

I'm looking for a role that doesn't have a clean title yet. Something at the intersection of taste, curation, culture, and connecting dots. It could be at a culturally-led brand like Nike, Spotify, or LEGO. It could be a product company that needs someone who thinks in culture and builds with conviction. It could be something in between that doesn't exist yet.

What I bring is range. I can go from brand strategy to product building to cultural analysis and make each one feel considered. I'm not a specialist. I'm the person who sees how it all connects. And now I can build it too.

Off the clock

• Nottingham Forest: lifelong, deep, part of who I am. Every Saturday, 3pm. Non-negotiable.
• London's food scene is my favourite thing about this city. Restaurants, markets, the sheer variety.
• Hot chocolate, not coffee. Caffeine doesn't agree with me.
• One son. London-based. Night owl who builds between 9pm and midnight.
• Currently obsessed with: Claude Code, Japanese language, and collecting bookshops I'll never open.