AI Should Not Do Your Thinking. It Should Make Your Thinking Better.
The hardest AI skill is not prompting. It is knowing when the answer deserves your trust, and using AI to strengthen rather than replace human judgment.
Building products. Coaching builders.
Make better product decisions. Build faster with AI. Remember what works.
Teams decide on vibes under uncertainty, then get trapped between slow, expensive builds and shadow-IT chaos. Dave helps them use AI to build and learn faster, make higher-quality decisions, and stop paying the amnesia tax.
Decide wellBuild to decideHuman-centeredData-informed
How Dave helps
Two capabilities product organizations need now.
01
Decide Well
Raise decision quality under uncertainty and install the decision memory that stops teams from relitigating what they already know.
Learn more →
02
Build to Decide
Use AI and vibe coding to prototype, learn, and make go/no-go decisions before expensive builds—without creating shadow-IT chaos.
Learn more →
Looking for a talk or team session? Explore speaking & workshops →
Experience across Cargill, Shipwell, U.S. Bank, Mayo Clinic, Medtronic, and the Carlson School of Management.
A challenge worth asking
Are you happy with the status quo?
Making great products, insights, and experiences is tough. Developing repeatable processes and teams that can make them is tough, too. Beyond the Data helps your organization question assumptions, connect people with evidence, and turn better thinking into better outcomes.
From insight to action
Diagnose. Design. Deliver.
Diagnose the real opportunity
Understand customers, teams, evidence, constraints, and what success actually means.
Design a practical path
Connect human needs and business outcomes to a focused product, data, or AI approach.
Deliver lasting capability
Build momentum while helping people and processes grow stronger—not more dependent.
Author & translator
Bridge the gap between numbers and narratives.
Dave is the author of Data Storytelling and Translation, a practical guide to helping data, business, and product people create shared understanding—and make better decisions together.
More about Dave →
Draft cover concept
Forthcoming book
The Amnesia Tax: What Forgetting Costs Your Organization
Organizations pay a hidden cost every time they re-decide a settled question or re-learn something they once knew. This book, now in development, explores how that tax compounds—and how organizational memory can stop it.
Read the related thinking on the blog.
New weekly podcast
The product conversations that don’t fit on a roadmap.
Dave Mathias and Allison Herbert host ProductCamp Conversations, a weekly podcast for curious product people. Join them—and occasional guests—as they think out loud about community, the human side of product, and what practitioners learn from one another.
Listen and subscribe →Latest ideas
See all ideas →Writing on AI, products, empathy, and better ways of working.
ProductCamp Conversations: Making Room for the Parts of Product That Don't Fit on a Roadmap
Allison Herbert and Dave Mathias are taking the spirit of ProductCamp into a new weekly podcast about community, the human side of product, and what practitioners learn when they compare notes.
The Amnesia Tax: What Forgetting Costs Your Organization
Organizations pay a hidden tax every time they relitigate a decision they already made. Here's what the amnesia tax is, why it compounds, and how to stop paying it.
Your AI Pilot Didn't Fail. Your Decision Process Did.
Most stalled enterprise AI pilots weren't killed by the technology. They were killed by decisions nobody made. Here's the diagnosis and what to do differently.
Vibe Coding Has Two Jobs. Most Companies Give It Neither.
Vibe coding earns its keep in two places: de-risking product bets before engineering gets expensive, and solving the long tail of internal problems engineering will never touch. Here's how to run both.
Ready to move beyond the status quo?
Let’s talk about your organization, audience, or next challenge.