Brook Warner · Product & Technology Leader

01

How I operate

01 / See it

I see the move before it's obvious. It comes from taking in more than most: a competitor's pivot, a podcast, the real job nobody's named, relevant data, and my own intuitions. From all of it I find the single thread, and the move it points to.

02 / Say it

I name the quiet part that no one quite says. I do it plainly and with the evidence to back it, because that is often what frees a group to move. I bring people with me rather than putting them on the defensive, so the hard thing becomes a shared decision instead of an argument.

03 / Build it

I reconcile the worlds that have to agree before anything ships. The commercial case, the technical reality, the people, the politics. Seeing it and building it are different skills, and doing both is the rare part. I go hands-on, in the code or the design, so it is a real thing and not a deck, and I hold the thread from the top-level down to the detail.

04 / Guide it

I take people through the ambiguity to a place they could not reach on their own. The builders get a route and the nerve to take the first step. The people backing it get the confidence to keep backing it. I have hiked enough real trails to know the feeling I am managing. You cannot see the top, the weather is turning, and someone has to keep the group moving and calm.

02

Selected adventures

A selection of products and tools I've built and led, end to end.

Digital Workforce

Enterprise AI platform with ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Zapier integrations.

Product

Creator Studio

PLG platform taken from activation to retention and enterprise readiness.

Product

Consumer AI Gallery

Consumer reference product proving real value for digital people.

Product

The Aetherlight

Learning-game MMO. 69% Day-30 retention, twice the industry average.

Product

cmd deck

Task management built for coordinating AI agents via MCP.

Build

Wildcraft

AI-automated web design studio.

Build

GroveKeeper

Weather-aware garden app with a ranked weekly task list and AI plant diagnosis.

Build

WilderOps

Admin and management platform for nature-based childcare centres.

Build

FinOps

Self-hosted personal finance app for NZ open-banking data. Open source.

Build

03

Experience

Soul Machines

Lifelike digital people. Avatars with a proprietary digital brain, connected to generative AI.

Jan 2025 to Jun 2026

Director of Product

When the mandate was a single line, “move upmarket”, I owned everything after it. Built the enterprise product strategy, brought the executive team along, and took Digital Workforce from zero to one with a small team in five months. Five enterprise customers and the ServiceNow Innovation Award 2025 followed.
As the agentic world started to proliferate, with every provider racing to ship another agent and another tool, I could see it becoming a race to the bottom we were not going to win. So I made the case for a different position. Not another agent, but the embodiment layer that sits on top of all of them. That reframe became the company's strategy, and the exit proved the call right.
A third of the way into a hard enterprise deadline, it was clear the scope that had been specced would not all make it. I told the CEO plainly that we had to cut the feature she cared about most, and brought three options rather than a verdict so the call was hers to make with me. We shipped on time.
Through all of it I owned the full product portfolio at once, from a consumer app to the enterprise platform and the API layer beneath it, so the strategy held together across very different products rather than pulling in three directions.
When the CTO left partway through, I became the anchor the engineering team steadied around, holding the roadmap together and keeping delivery on track.

Jan 2024 to Jan 2025

Group Product Manager

With the company's focus on winning the buyer, I made the case that the end user was the one who ultimately decided whether the product worked. Rather than leave it as an opinion, I led the build of a consumer product to prove it. It reached millions of conversations, reshaped where the company invested, and kept investors at the table.
Alongside that I took the self-serve product's unit economics in hand and worked the funnel end to end, moving free-to-paid from 27% to 42%, CAC from $2,018 down to $278, and MRR from $105k to $137k.
I grew three product managers in the process, each owning a different edge of the business, across growth, monetisation, and core product.

Dec 2020 to Dec 2023

Product Manager / Senior Product Manager

Pivoted the company from sales-led to product-led growth, with self-serve signup and in-product onboarding. My throughline was activation: I moved the aha moment into onboarding, so people felt the value before setup friction could lose them.
When every digital avatar was a bespoke six-month build by a team of artists, I owned the retool that broke the bottleneck. I codified what they did by hand into a self-serve generative stack, with the engine, business logic, and QA around it, so a new avatar went from months of craft to minutes of configuration. Capacity went from six a year to thousands, and signups reached 114k.
With the avatar pipeline needing five squads and no product headcount coming, I deputised an engineer in each one as a product owner. I coached them weekly, handed over real ownership of the backlog and the calls, and kept the strategy myself. They grew into leaders, and several carried it into later careers.
This was regulated enterprise AI from the start, delivered for JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer, and the World Health Organization, where the bar for safety and compliance left no room to be loose.

Jan 2018 to Dec 2020

Senior Project Manager

I delivered 15 enterprise contracts worth around $4M, every one on time across 2019 and 2020.
I also brought agile value streams into an organisation that had never worked that way, selling the change as a low-risk experiment rather than mandating it, and took delivery waste down by around 25%.

Warner and the Wild

Independent AI product and enablement practice, embedding with leadership teams.

2025 to Present

Principal

I ran an AI Foundations engagement for the CSL Group leadership team, read a business I had never seen before, and handed back agent briefs shaped so a developer could build them, then built a portfolio of production agents hands-on myself rather than only advising on them.

Scarlet City Studios

Venture-backed game studio building learning games that teach through play.

Mar 2012 to Dec 2017

Co-Founder & Head of Studio Operations

When a children's education charity that had run for 80 years was closing, the boldest idea in the room was a website. I saw that the real job was to make the learning genuinely fun, and the way to do it was a game that taught through its mechanics rather than lecturing. That became The Aetherlight, and the start of my product career.
I raised $5M in seed funding and grew the studio to 35 people, with the directors of art, technical, design, and sound reporting to me while I owned culture, operations, process, and product.
I shipped The Aetherlight, an online action-adventure MMO across iOS, Android, and desktop, to 30,000 players at 69% Day-30 retention, twice the industry average.
Alongside it I shipped two augmented-reality museum games in Washington DC, three titles in all.

Education & certifications

MSc Medical Science (Microbiology), First Class Honours, University of Auckland.

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Equinox IT.

04

What people say

I've worked closely with Brook for many years, and what I value most about him is that he's a builder. A lot of people can optimise something that's already working. Brook's super-power kicks in when things are messy, unclear and need figuring out. When you are at the start of your journey, he's the person you want in the trenches with you, working out the details as you navigate from zero. What makes his story at Soul Machines unique is that the majority of the things he worked on didn't exist when he started. The platform, operating model, delivery practices, and product discipline all evolved significantly during his time there, and Brook played a key role in that journey. He wore more hats than his job title ever suggested; product manager, delivery lead, architect, technical translator, problem solver, and more often than not the person holding everything together when the path forward wasn't obvious. He doesn't see product, technology, delivery, and operations as separate disciplines. He understands how they connect. He can execute, optimise and iterate to the highest standard. Just as importantly, he's honest about what worked, what didn't, and what he'd do differently next time. I'd hire Brook again in a heartbeat.

Darren WilsonChief Product Officer, Soul Machines

I started at Soul Machines in 2018 at the same time as Brook, and from day one he's been my product owner and product director. Over the years, I've learned more about engineering from him than from many engineers - not the syntax and tools, but the things that truly make software successful. Brook has a rare ability to ask the right questions without prescribing the answers, forcing you to ground solutions in the customer's story, the data, and the 'why.' What makes him stand out most is his ability to be a connector - not just glue between teams, but growing the team into becoming part of the solution. He can operate at 10,000 feet strategically, then jump into a design sprint, prototyping in code or Figma to bridge gaps. He has an uncanny ability to grok things across disciplines, quickly bridging knowledge gaps that would otherwise slow a project down. Brook's influence has been one of the biggest factors in my growth as an engineer - great product leadership isn't about having all the answers, it's about creating conditions for the team to find the right ones.

Reuben SmithContract Developer, 7 years alongside Brook at Soul Machines

I'm fortunate to have collaborated with Brook on a number of projects over the years and have come to trust him as the person to drive effective change. He's quick to grasp new ideas and distil them to wider audiences. His decisions are deeply rooted in strategic vision and substantiated by diligent market research. He can balance the needs of users, customers, stakeholders, engineers, and designers. Brook is a brilliant product manager and a natural people leader. I'd be delighted to work with him whatever the project.

Lia PoolSenior Experience Engineer, Soul Machines

I would commend Brook for any role where you are looking for a combination of creative problem solving & team & project management. In my capacity as a strategic advisor to Scarlet City Studios, I worked alongside Brook in his role as Producer for 2 years. He is diligent, possesses a really broad range of capability & thrives in both structured & unstructured situations. Brook has that quality that you look for in every employee but rarely find; the ability to proactively identify & take responsibility wherever it's needed. He gets my vote.

Mitch OlsonStrategic advisor, Scarlet City Studios

I had the pleasure of working under Brook's supervision in a variety of projects at Scarlet City Studios. Brook is a natural leader and mentor, and created a space where I was able to grow and explore what leadership in a game studio meant to me. I credit Brook for the many good qualities that I show in my leadership in roles that I've held since Scarlet City Studios, and thoroughly recommend him for any role that would see him mentoring more junior staff.

Ludmila Miranda-DukoskiGame Programmer, RocketWerkz

05 / Contact

Open to senior product and technology leadership roles.

Auckland-based. Hybrid, onsite, or remote.

[email protected] LinkedIn GitHub