Todd Blocksom · Principal product leader, AI platforms · Seattle

Twenty-five years on the human end of hard systems.

Dragon Drive in 200 million vehicles, Siri in the car, Google Cloud’s analytics surface. The work was never the technology alone. It was making it something people trusted and teams chose to adopt. Now I build AI-native products firsthand.

Abstract painting: heavy black horizontal brushstrokes over a hidden red mark, with paint running down from their lower edges.
Untitled · Todd Blocksom, acrylic on canvas
A band of night sky, deep indigo shading down into luminous blue.
Todd Blocksom, oil on canvas

Work

  1. 2023 to now
    47north Technologies
    Founder and principal consultant

    Independent product leadership and R&D across AI-native and resilient systems.

    • HIDE/SEEK 2026 to now

      Privacy-first location-based multiplayer game, taken from first commit to TestFlight beta in seven weeks. Owned strategy, game economy, design, architecture, implementation, privacy, and release. Now in public beta.

    • Totem Grid 2025 to now

      Principal PM for an offline-first mesh platform. Led product for a 100-person deployment at Burning Man, which converted into follow-on work supporting volunteer infrastructure and 2026 World Cup operations in Vancouver.

    • Apple, Commerce and Payments 2023 to 2024

      Contract program manager. Scoped EU Digital Markets Act impact for the analytics organization and drove GDPR-aligned anonymization work.

  2. 2018 to 2022
    Google
    Senior TPM, Cloud Data Analytics

    Sole TPM for a 65-person organization spanning more than a dozen Google Cloud analytics products. Built adoption for a shared component platform with no authority to mandate it, prioritizing the highest-value surfaces first, which cut implementation effort for common UI by 80%. Directed the accessibility certification that enabled public-sector opportunities representing more than $2B.

  3. 2016 to 2018
    Apple
    Senior engineering program manager, Siri

    Resolved a privacy and model-quality impasse by documenting the end-to-end Siri data pipeline and winning Legal approval for PII-scrubbed retention, increasing usable Siri training signal fourfold while exceeding GDPR requirements. Led Siri delivery for Do Not Disturb While Driving from executive directive to iOS 11 launch in one compressed summer cycle, and am co-inventor on the resulting Operational Safety Mode patent family.

  4. 2013 to 2016
    Nuance
    Principal PM, Automotive

    Owned the roadmap for Dragon Drive, Nuance’s conversational automotive platform, deployed across voice programs for BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and other global OEMs. The platform reached more than 200 million vehicles and powered the conversational core of MBUX.

  5. 2001 to 2013
    Earlier
    • RealNetworks

      Pitched, built, and led a six-designer centralized UX studio.

    • Tweddle Group and Loudeye

      Product leadership for automotive platforms, including Toyota Entune and Chrysler Uconnect, and for digital media services, including the O2 Germany music store.

    • Microsoft

      Shipped Office and MSN products, hold a patent on the Persona Menu, and built an event-condition-action prototype for cross-application automation in Office.

A band of crimson brushwork sweeping diagonally into grey.
Todd Blocksom, oil on canvas

HIDE/SEEK

A location-based multiplayer game that turns a neighborhood into a game board. I took it from first commit to TestFlight beta in seven weeks, owning strategy, game economy, interaction design, system architecture, implementation, privacy, and release. It is in public TestFlight beta.

Read the case study myneighborhoodgames.com

Point of view

At Nuance, the problem was making voice interaction work at seventy miles an hour. At Apple, it was preserving useful learning signal without compromising privacy. At Google, it was earning adoption across a dozen teams that did not report to me.

The pattern was always the same. Raw technical capability was rarely what stood between someone and the outcome they wanted. The gap was in what the system assumed about them, what it made them prove, and how much work it handed back. In each case the product work was closing that gap, not adding capability.

That shapes how I think about AI. The interesting question is not how much of someone’s job an AI product can do. It is whether the person using it can do things they could not do before. Good AI makes expertise more valuable, not less.

Building an entire product through an AI-native workflow this past year confirmed the pattern. AI compressed implementation. What it did not compress was judgment, context, product taste, and system design.

Contact

If you’re hiring for an ambitious AI product and need someone who understands both the technology and the people using it, I’d like to hear about it.

Write to todd@47northtech.com, find me on LinkedIn, or download my resume.