LinkedIn is the most powerful platform for building trust, growing your brand, and attracting high-value opportunities.

But most creators and consultants approach it the wrong way — chasing engagement instead of authority.

That’s where strategy comes in.

I help digital entrepreneurs simplify their content, clarify their message, and build a personal brand that attracts the right audience.

Here’s what you’ll find on my profile:

→ Actionable content strategies for LinkedIn growth
→ Systems to turn content into inbound opportunities
→ Positioning frameworks that build trust at scale

Whether you're a creator, coach, or founder — authority is your most valuable asset.

Let’s build it right.

Nikhel R.

Brief

While AI agents can build and ship code at unprecedented speed, they lack the strategic context and product intuition to make meaningful decisions. Brief provides the missing "intention layer" - giving AI agents business context, user understanding, and institutional memory to make intelligent product trade-offs.

CEO and Founder

Mocksi

Mocksi is revolutionizing the way software companies sell, learn, and evolve their products through AI-powered simulations. Our platform empowers businesses to create dynamic, interactive demonstrations that showcase their software's full potential, gather valuable market insights, and continuously adapt to meet evolving customer needs.

CEO and Co-founder

ProductBridge

Principal

Burb

Founder

Skedulo

Advisor

Skedulo is the platform for intelligent mobile workforce management. Our web and mobile apps help enterprises intelligently schedule, dispatch, and track jobs in the field with real-time visibility and communication, creating a more productive mobile operation.

Chief Product Officer (Product, Engineering, and Design)

Fond, formerly AnyPerk

Fond helps organizations across industries strengthen their company cultures through an ongoing commitment to employee happiness. Our employee engagement products are intuitively designed and flexible so companies can tailor rewards, recognition, perks and sentiment measurement programs for maximum impact.

VP of Product, Engineering, and Business Development

Microsoft

Lead half of the PM organization within Yammer, including four product managers and three business development managers.

My team focused on everything from growth to mobile app development, web features, and API/platform development. My platform BD team evangelized the Yammer API to partners and trained them on Yammer's model of growth, retention, and engagement.

Principal Program Manager Lead

Yammer, Inc.

Conceived and executed many successful launches (press below):
• Ticker
• Universal Search
• Yammer Connect & Embed
• Salesforce
• SharePoint
• Many partner integrations (https://www.yammer.com/applications), SAP, Dynamics

Director of Product Management

SafeNet

•	Continuing work with the DataSecure Product Line
•	Assisting in development of the corporate Enterprise Data Protection strategy
•	Expanding knowledge of the Product Lifecycle Process, as it applies to midsized multi-nationals

Senior Product Manager, Data Protection

Ingrian Networks

•	Learned Product Lifecycle Management: from strategic vision, near-term milestones, to end-of-life
•	Maintained constant high-level customer interaction to drive requirements, strategic and tactical
•	Worked cross-functionally with Marketing, Engineering, Sales, and Support
•	Released two well-adopted new products and a series of upgrades

Product Manager

•	Performed all functions, pre and post-sales, relating to the deployment of the DataSecure product line
•	Supported global Enterprise and Government sales
•	Worked closely with upper management and technical decision makers of Fortune 500s
•	Studied the pain points of compliance/security in large enterprise

Systems/Sales Engineer

An experienced operator, with a background as an individual contributor in Design, Engineering, Sales, and Product and leadership experience in Product, Engineering, Data, Design, and Business Development.

Andrew Dillon

Been holding off on a full Brief demo because we've been shipping so fast the UI changes every few days 👀 

But we finally hit a more backend-focused moment, so here's 10 weeks of Brief (a16z speedrun sr005).

The short version: Brief is product intelligence that moves at AI velocity.

Product managers currently keep a dozen systems in their head. Analytics, Slack, GitHub, Notion, Fireflies, Linear. It takes days to synthesize all that into strategy. Brief does it in seconds.

What you'll see in the video:
Strategy Agent - generates your full company context (customers, business model, competitive position, goals, dev process)

Work Agent - Shows your entire pipeline from idea to shipped feature

Persona Agent - Understands who your users are from analytics and call notes

CPO Agent - Monitors for new patterns, invalidated assumptions, and market opportunities

All of this feeds into Decisions. The atomic units we pass to coding agents so they build the right thing the first time.

Through MCPs, Brief orchestrates everything: writes PRDs, creates tickets, and gives your coding agents the context they need.

Brief is for teams that don't have time for quarterly planning cycles. Connect corporate strategy directly to your coding agents and ship 10x faster.

About 100 years ago, a group of product leaders got together out of frustration that most product events targeted entry level PMs.

It was an incredible group, including product leaders like Jackie, Vrushali, Gadi, Louisa, Neil, Christina, Nat, Gemmy (we need to meet up!).

It was through PM Leads that I met Ely.

Even before he was an educator and startup advisor to the stars, I benefitted from Ely's pragmatic approach to product management.

Fast forward our careers through jobs, teaching, advisory, fractional work, Ely's still a great sounding board for product strategy. Just as smart about the operation of modern product development with agents as he was with user intuition growing Yelp and Chime.

Sounds like his dance card is pretty full, but if you get a chance, you should definitely try and get Ely as an advisor for your startup!

Story time... one of our amazing design partners, Anurag Agarwalla reached out Monday.

He was on the move and wanted to use Brief (a16z speedrun sr005) on his phone, but didn't have the login address.

I shared it with some nervousness, we're a tiny team and haven't had a chance to optimize our mobile experience. But that's what great design partners do, they push your thinking.

The result below.

Anurag was able to jam out the PRD for an incredible new onboarding. Brief created detailed user stories, referencing all of hpy's existing product context.

Unblocking and directing his team with perfect clarity.... from his phone.

Wanna know the secret of 10x engineering performance?

....ready?

....really realllllllly wanna know?

Here it is: give them enough context to make the right decisions and then get the f- out of their way.

For every feature, engineers make dozens, hundreds of decisions that aren't in mocks, PRDs, or prototypes. 

With the right context, they make the right decisions. Without it, they're left to guess or have to interrupt their flow to ask.

This is why it's such a massive unlock for engineers to take part in user research. They will never ever forget what a user said in a research session.

Now extrapolate that to coding agents that jam out thousands of lines of code in minutes. There millions of decisions happening daily that aren't in cursrorrules, claude.md, or agents.md files.

Without context, they're made incorrectly. The result is either rework or delivering the wrong thing for the user and the company.

You're hamstringing your efforts at modernization and pouring token money down the drain if you aren't giving your coding agents product intelligence at the speed they operate.

Had coffee with a friend yesterday who showed me an AI app they're trying out. On one page, they had a "product manager agent" as one option in a list of 20+ virtual coworkers.

Every Brief (a16z speedrun sr005) demo, people see we can write documents, create tickets, write code, etc. and want us to branch out into other domains.

The obvious question: why build specialized agents when one can do so much?

Depth and context.

𝗗𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗵
Foundational models are better accountants than me. Better lawyers than me. But this doesn't make them particularly good accountants or lawyers.

When you talk to your lawyer about a case, there's back-and-forth. They pull from past cases that seem unrelated to yours. They have ways of bucketing legal concepts that shape how they see your situation. They apply precedent through frameworks built from years of practice.

You're not just getting information plugged into a workflow. You're getting a multivariate understanding of how to think through a problem. That's depth.

Ways of working through problems that come from deep expertise, not just being really smart about something.

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁
Context means more than a big context window. Real context is both volume *and* attention.

Critical product decisions necessitate an understanding of customer needs, user personas, 6-month goals, company mission, values, shipping velocity.

You can dump all that into a million-token window. But the right approach gives an agent tools to understand the challenge plus a goal-seeking drive derived from deep experience.

Specialized agent swarms work because each sub-agent provides individual context. The orchestrator pulls from these layers to make better decisions.

---

General-purpose systems can be extremely powerful. Much like LLMs themselves, society hasn't fully priced in the value of really easy workflows like we haven't priced in the value of really good autocomplete.

But there's a gulf between virtual coworker platforms and delivering critical expertise in a deep domain.

Straight cookin' w/Opus 4.5 (and fewer calls due to the holiday week 😅).

This was last night, on another one today...

"What should we build next?"

You know the answer. It's somewhere in Linear. And GitHub. And that call transcript from last week. And the decision you made in Slack two months ago about not building that feature.

So you tab over to Linear to see what the team's working on. Check GitHub to see what actually shipped. Skim through Granola transcripts to remember what users said. Try to recall which features you decided to prioritize and why.

You synthesize all of this in your head. Then you go back to the agent and give it an answer.

You just became a human API between your agent and reality.

That's what we're fixing. Brief pulls your product reality from where it already lives - Linear, GitHub, your research, your codebase - and makes it available to your agents through MCP.

Velocity tracking shows you what your team is actually shipping and how fast.
User intelligence tells you who you're building for based on what's in your features, marketing, and codebase.

Feature pipeline connects what you're researching, planning, building, and shipping in one view.

The agents get context. You stop being the bottleneck.

briefHQ dot ai - DM me to skip the line.

Thankful today for:

❤️ The love and support of my family, who indulge my crazy founder aspirations (and 1/10th of nearterm earning potential 😅)

🎢 Brief (a16z speedrun sr005)'s investors, day 0 to day N, for giving me perspective through the ups and downs

🎨 Stephan for his zero ego support of whatever-needs-done

🧑‍🚀 Our earliest customers for their belief and pushing us to be our best

Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends and family in the US. And a fist bump to all of you for following along and rooting from the sidelines.

Founders don't just wake up one morning and say, "My product strategy sucks." 

Because a lack of product leadership actually looks like:
- Slow delivery times
- Features not coming out as expected
- Untamable bugs and decreasing quality
- Pissed off customers

And basically being stuck in minutia, when you're trying to deliver that big vision you promised investors.

Ripped from the headlines... of Stephan and I asking Brief (a16z speedrun sr005) how we should position Brief.

What do you think "product sense" too squishy?

View company: Brief (a16z speedrun sr005)

What is “Product Sense"?

Everyone talks about it. Few can define it.
I'm asking because we're positioning Brief as "Product Sense at AI Velocity”… but I'm not sure that's right.

Brief gives AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude, etc.) access to your business context: who your customers are, what you're building, why decisions were made. The stuff that keeps agents from shipping technically perfect features that miss the mark.

But "product sense at AI velocity"... does that land?

So tell me: What does product sense actually mean to you?

(Asking for a friend… That friend is me.)

The future of software development are engineering, product management, and design agents coordinating work, driven by small teams with taste and intuition.

It's pretty easy to extrapolate where this goes with coding agents. Come get a demo of Brief (a16z speedrun sr005) if you want to see "the future of product management."*

I posed this question to Stephan, "What does a design agent look like?"

The industry response has been design systems and prototyping. Which was where my head was when I asked Stephan, as he'd led design system efforts at Autodesk.

But his answer pointed back to something much more elemental. Color.

Non-designers don't think about color a lot. Throw in a hex code or RGB and move on. But hex codes are calculations, they don't render the same everywhere.

This has a compounding effect when your hex-based design system meets tailwind tokenization and then meets an application framework. The same color might be converted 3-4 times from your designs in Figma.

Compound this with coding agents' propensity to just make up a new shade or inject inline literals and your color palette asplode.

So Stephan's answer to "what does a design agent look like?"

Was that it would start with something that helps him work across application and cross context and standardize seemingly simple concepts like color.

We've got our plates full, but excited to see and partner with folks building this!

--

* actual quote from a new angel investor working at a foundational model lab

Product managers need to give up the idea of owning all the outputs.

Instead focus on infusing the entire organization with product sense and judgement.

The walls between product roles are dissolving.

PMs read production code in morning standup. Designers manage hundreds of product documents. Engineers iterate on UI mockups before lunch.

For decades, we maintained clean boundaries. "PMs own the roadmap. Designers own the experience. Engineers own the implementation." Tidy. Slow.
AI tools collapse domain knowledge that used to require years to build. A PM traces bugs through the codebase. A designer synthesizes customer research at scale. An engineer tests five interaction patterns in the time it used to take to schedule a design review.

Teams now work in each other's territory, not to step on toes, but to move faster together. When your PM understands technical constraints viscerally, when your designer has context on every customer conversation, when your engineer validates their own UX decisions, you stop playing telephone. You build like a single organism.

The best product teams in 2025 won't have the clearest swim lanes. They'll have learned to let everyone swim in the same pool.

The domain walls are coming down. Your tools and culture either enable this overlap or fight against it. Build accordingly.

Used to be people who tried to connect with me without an intro message were trying to sell me something.

Now they're all trying to get into speedrun.

Had a dream I was fundraising for a bunch of vendors we buy from at Brief (a16z speedrun sr005). 

I was able to clearly state evaluation criteria, competitive differentiation, and ROI. Made me think of all the ways I’ve screwed up pitches in the past 😅

taplio

The Battle

Nikhel R.

Andrew Dillon

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The Battle

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Andrew Dillon

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Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Andrew Dillon's LinkedIn Performance

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