Tia Aoake

Product Leader & Consultant

Tia Aoake

Product Leader & Consultant

At any growth stage, the key to reduce market and execution risk is to empower engineers with customer insights

As a product leader, that’s what I do for startups–specializing on the products, services that increase well-being.

Startups

Startups find product/market fit by gathering continuous, actionable and strategic market insights designed to execute rapidly.

As a product leader, I ensure this translation work from the market, customer, user is instantly actionable for engineering–and everything else in-between to get the job done.

My focus:

  1. Increase CEO and PM bandwidth for critical projects and stages.
  2. Coach CEO and PMs on strategy, discovery and execution.

Experience:

  • I led 8 GTM strategies across healthcare, well-being tech, AI, Apps, eCommerce & Supply Chain.
  • Startup founder (Platform, AI, Consumer App).
  • Pilot innovative internal venture that challenged core business (SaaS, Circular Economy).
  • Sr. PM, helped scale engineering from 30 to 130 (Article, Canada’s fastest-growing startup).
  • Led tech transformation of 5 business units, 5 engineering teams and 12 core systems (eCommerce, Supply Chain, DTC).
  • Active PM Mentor (Product BC, Canada’s largest PM network).
  • Ex-product at venture studio focused developing innovation services framework and leading design-sprints.

For Early-Stage Founders

I help with:

  • Increase product bandwidth for major pivots, during rapid team growth and critical milestones.
  • Gather and build a continuous customer insights pipeline to empower engineering execution.
  • Bridge CEO vision and strategy with execution roadmap.

For Late-Stage Founders/Teams

I help with:

  • Lead keystone major pilots, MVP or major feature development.
  • Increase PM bandwidth to ensure the core team stays focused on the critical path.
  • Coach PMs to create a continuous customer insights pipeline to empower engineering execution.

Well-being

In today’s world, people are busy, stressed, and feeling disconnected with a fractured healthcare system being slow, high-cost and services lacking empathy.

From my personal journey using a CBT-driven app to lose 10kg in 12 months and later going to therapy exposed to me how powerful a combination of empathetic technologies and authentic relationships are core to sustainable personal transformation.

As a product leader, in the well-being space–mental, emotional, and social health–I specialize in helping founders develop their products, services and technology that are empathy-centred.

My focus:

  1. Increase CEO and product bandwidth for critical projects and stages.
  2. Coach Founders and PM on vision, strategy, discovery and execution.

Experience:

  • Co-founder Ways of Being (Venture studio for well-being technology).
  • AI-guided mindful dating platform and coaching service focusing on healthy communication, authenticity and trust-building.
  • AI-powered and practice-integrated journaling app that enhances therapist interaction and patient outcomes.
  • Consumer app for on-demand stress reduction that leverages adaptive learning and feedback.
  • Vital AI: AI-powered SaaS ER patient prioritization portal.

For Well-being Tech Founders

I help with:

  • Develop strategies to balance profit incentives and health outcomes.
  • Increase product bandwidth for major pivots, during rapid team growth and critical milestones.
  • Reduce GTM risks with early-stage discovery to find product/market fit.
  • Build continuous customer insights and research practices to empower engineering execution.

Start a project today

Get in touch

My technology career and life have been an empathy-building journey.

For 8 years, I’ve worked in a mixture of roles—software engineer, creative developer, product designer—before finding my place as a product leader and founder thriving in the challenges of the startup 0-to-1 space. I gravitated to the nature of leading as a product manager and founder and as the ultimate practice of empathy: influencing, listening, and leading without, and specifically not, managing people.

In recent years, I’ve been highly motivated to build disruptive and innovative technology that serves both people and the planet.

As a co-founder of Aloe by Article—delivering furniture to 1 million homes in the US—I identified the opportunity to create a circular economy solution that challenges modern retail and reduces waste. With deep empathy for consumers who lack purchasing power in society, I focused on developing a business model that was both competitive and took responsibility for the entire life cycle of the products produced.

As a co-founder of Ways of Being (Well-being tech venture studio), I channeled my desire to focus on the mental health space, seeking ways to help people feel more connected and calm—two of the biggest challenges I have personally experienced and observed in modern society. Inspired by my exposure to Internal Family Systems Therapy, which believes that we all have an innate ability to authentically heal ourselves, I aim to build solutions aligned with this belief that counter the increasing ambient stress of modern life.

Currently, my focus is on helping startup founders and their teams build transformational technologies, on a mission to build well-being tech.