There’s no shortage of know-it-alls and grifters on the internet claiming expertise in everything. Open X and it’s non-stop AI threads promising to take down whole industries. The real specialists are usually too busy doing the work.
Converge Studio is a solo practice — you get one operator, one point of view, one person accountable. But product work has edges: pricing psychology, technical due diligence, design systems, go-to-market repositioning. Sometimes the sharpest move is bringing in someone who’s spent a career on exactly that.
When that’s the right call, I pull from a network built over fifteen years. Sometimes it’s a five-minute gut check. When it’s more, they partner under my engagement with your sign-off, billed separately.
Specialists directory
Role
Where
Featured
Strategist
Mark Bissell
Executive Coach | Fractional Exec
Mark is a seasoned SaaS leader who bridges the gap between ambitious strategy and sustainable execution. Over a 25-year career featuring three successful exits, he has served in C-level roles including COO and CCO, helping teams navigate the high-stakes complexities of scaling. Having sat on both sides of numerous M&A transactions, Mark serves as a vital strategic resource for leaders integrating acquisitions or preparing for an exit. He combines this "hot seat" experience with grounded coaching to help founders and operators sharpen focus and align their teams during the most pivotal transitions of a company’s lifecycle.
East Coast
Designer
Ashley Branch
Staff Product Designer
Ashley Branch is a Staff Product Designer on the Pacific Design System team at SoFi. With a background spanning architecture, visual design, and UX, she brings over a decade of experience designing high-quality, visually refined experiences for consumer and B2C platforms across native and web. Ashley is passionate about systems, strategy, and elevating experiences in a scalable way — she's the kind of designer whose creativity is matched by her process, and whose contributions shape product strategy as much as the pixels on the screen.
East Coast
AI/ML
Cubby Brendle
AI/ML Engineer
Cubby Brendle is a software engineer with the rare range to go deep anywhere the problem demands it. At Jibe, he built the backbone of the data integrations engine that powered the platform's connection to enterprise systems. Today he's at iCIMS working on complex AI/ML problems at the frontier of talent technology. Engineers like Cubby are unusual — equally at home in the systems plumbing, the application layer, and the research-adjacent work most teams hire three different people for.
West Coast
Engineer
Carrie Streed Dixon
Senior Software & UX Engineer
Carrie Streed Dixon is a senior frontend engineer with nearly a decade of building products that reach millions of users. She's shipped for Fortune 500 companies handling hundreds of millions of quarterly visitors and transformed engineer-dependent products into self-service platforms. Her technical guidance reaches beyond the engineering org into product strategy, and the combination of her technical chops and design sense has been essential to establishing product-market fit. She specializes in 0-to-1 product development and the kind of engineering standards that hold up as teams grow. A Navy veteran, Carrie brings disciplined leadership and systematic problem-solving wherever she lands.
West Coast
Strategist
Ella
Emotional Support
What Ella lacks in terms of distributed systems architecture and scalable product data model knowledge, she makes up for in seeking hugs and acrobatic ball catches. Unlike the spots in our Hero banner, Ella's spots show no signs of converging.
NYC Area
Strategist
Joe Essenfeld
CEO / Founder
Joe Essenfeld is a founder and operator who builds software where industries hit friction. Over two decades he's launched and led category-defining companies in HR tech and AI — Jibe, acquired by iCIMS in 2019, and Fora, an AI system of record for enterprise communication. Now he's turning that founder's instinct on the freight industry his family has worked for four generations, leading at Pig-Tainer while building Conterminal to bring AI into a domain that's barely been touched by it. Few people know intermodal from the inside the way Joe does, and fewer still have spent twenty years shipping software to solve problems like the ones he's now taking on.
NYC Area
AI/ML
Dan Harcsztark
Engineering Leader
Tech-obsessed founder and experienced engineering leader with a track record of delivering high-impact large-scale projects. Extremely passionate about developing innovative software focused on detail and quality. Deep understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure. Comfortable coaching engineers and diving into code, architecture, and ops.
NYC Area
Product Manager
Matteo Hernandez
Sr. Principal Product Manager
Enterprise AI PM who can spot a real problem, cut through the noise, and ship. Leads a portfolio of AI products spanning consumer experience, automation, and conversational agents. Builds side projects the way others take notes.
NYC Area
Product Manager
Kevin Lee
Sr Principle Product Manager
Product Manager, entrepreneur, and customer obsessed. Trusted to forward deploy with the most critical logos and ensure successful delivery.
NYC Area
Strategist
Eddie Lempenski
Employer Brand Director
Extensive experience in brand management, graphic design, digital marketing, social media, UX, web analytics, digital video production, partnerships and media buying. A creative and effective leader with a proven record of successful global digital marketing campaigns, leading to increased brand awareness, web traffic, ROI and a larger, more engaged social media community. Recognized for delivering innovative desktop and mobile applications for a Fortune 500 employer, across a global audience.
NYC Area
Customer Success
Jon Schlueter
Global Support Leader
Jon Schlueter is a born and raised New Yorker, which explains why he has little patience for support organizations that accept mediocrity as a baseline. He's spent over fifteen years in customer-facing roles from scrappy startups to large public companies, leading global teams through the kinds of growth and chaos that tend to break things. Lately, he's been the person in the room actually figuring out what AI inside a support org should look like, not as a cost-cutting play, but as a genuine rethink of the experience for customers and the people serving them. He's a support leader who thinks like a product manager and builds like an engineer.
NYC Area
Designer
Brandon Siu
Senior Product Designer
Brandon Siu is a senior product designer based in New York with over 6 years of experience crafting end-to-end product and visual design solutions for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. From redefining smart home experiences to streamlining restaurant operations, he designs products that are thoughtful, engaging, and user-centric. He currently leads product design for Toast's kitchen operations team, driving innovation in B2B restaurant software, and is always exploring new perspectives to refine his approach and create impactful user experiences.
NYC Area
Engineer
David Small
Head of Technology
Dave Small is a long-time software engineer who has led teams to build large, high-concurrency, distributed applications across many verticals. His leadership style involves getting his hands dirty alongside his colleagues. Part of the "dirty-hands" approach means he has experience across a range of languages (Python, Java, ...), database solutions (relational, No SQL, and column store), cloud providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure), and LLMs (OpenAI, AzureAI, Gemini, and Anthropic). He looks forward to building the next big thing.
NYC Area
Strategist
Anabelle Uy
Marketing Architect
Anabelle Uy is a B2B marketer at LinkedIn with over a decade of experience driving growth programs and pioneering new initiatives across the organizations she's been part of. She builds marketing programs grounded in deep customer insights, personalization at scale, and tight alignment with go-to-market partners — from launching net-new ABM motions to standing up inaugural partner and direct marketing programs to navigating M&A transitions. Operationally minded and detail-oriented, Anabelle believes the strongest marketing programs work in lockstep with cross-functional teams to drive impact.
NYC Area
Designer
Sarah Wallack
Founder, designer, and art director
Sarah Wallack is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary designer creating visually innovative experiences through bold, functional, and imaginative work. Her brand design career spans names like Major League Baseball, AB InBev's Cutwater Spirits, and Hyundai's FIFA World Cup '26 Fan Fest. An avid runner and certified running coach, Sarah recently co-founded Williams Green, a running sock company where her design sense — honed across brand and now physical product — is what brings the whole thing together.
NYC Area
Rules of Engagement
The rules of engagement.
01
You never hire them directly.
Specialists work under the Convergence engagement. I scope the need, I recommend who fits, I stay accountable for the outcome. You have one relationship — with me.
02
Their time is billed separately.
Specialist hours are not included in your retainer. They're billed at the specialist's rate, with no markup, and only after you approve the scope and budget up front.
03
Nobody joins without your sign-off.
Before any specialist sees your data or sits in your meetings, we agree on what they're doing, for how long, and what it costs. No surprises.
Get in touch
Have a specialist-shaped problem?
Got it.
I’ll reply within 48 hours from hello@converge.studio.
Strategist
