Webmaster during a formative open-source chapter, approximately 2002–2005.
Product leader / founder / systems thinker
Build what
matters.
I’m Steve Mallett. For 18+ years, I’ve worked at technology’s leading edge—from open source and SaaS platforms to AI agents, agentic coding, and autonomous workflows.
Explore the trajectoryCo-founded the O’Reilly/Google Open Source Awards.
Invited attendee at Startup School.
Delivered a closing keynote on open source.
Halifax, Canada
Selected trajectory
From signal
to scale.
Across startups and global enterprise, the through-line is the same: find the real problem, sharpen the story, and move a capable team toward something customers value.
Senior Product Manager — Arctic Wolf
Product leadership for third-party integrations designed to improve threat detection across MITRE ATT&CK tactics.
Director of Product — Mariner Partners
Launched a network observability and automation platform for Tier-1 telecoms, accelerating MVP validation and delivery by 6+ months.
Product Lead — Cvent
Modernized Exhibitor Management to reduce support burden and enable upsell; led UX redesign across thousands of annual events and co-founded a product management guild.
Product Manager — LuminUltra
Led mobile and cloud strategy and relaunched a mission-critical mobile application.
Founder — R17
Built a developer-focused SaaS product that signed the world’s #2 e-commerce company.
Startup Mentor — PropelICT
Former mentor to early-stage founders navigating products, markets, and momentum.
Co-founded the O’Reilly / Google Open Source Awards.
Recognition created with two institutions that helped define the modern technology ecosystem—celebrating the people moving open source forward.
Earlier chapter: helped steward opensource.org as webmaster during 2002–2005.
Writer & Editor — O’Reilly / java.net
Covered emerging technology for O’Reilly’s books and events network and served as an editor for java.net.
Invited Voice — Gartner / Y Combinator
Delivered Gartner’s closing keynote on open source and was an invited attendee at Y Combinator’s Startup School.
Operating system
Clarity is a
force multiplier.
Good product work is not theatre. It is a disciplined way to reduce uncertainty, make choices visible, and create momentum around the right outcome.
Find the sharp edge.
Start with the decision, constraint, or customer pain that actually changes the shape of the work.
Make the story useful.
Turn technical and market complexity into a narrative a team can reason about—and act on.
Learn in the real world.
Move toward evidence early. Products get better when ideas meet users, constraints, and consequences.
Special projects / AI agents
Work with
the machines.
I run special projects that develop with, use, and deploy AI agents—turning a fast-moving technical frontier into practical systems and sharper product intuition.
01
The agent shift
Heads-down since mid-February, when OpenClaw burst onto the scene—exploring what changes when agents can reason, operate tools, and carry work forward.
02
Long before the hype
Years spent vibecoding and kicking at the edges of the emerging ecosystem—from Cursor and Claude Code to increasingly autonomous workflows.
From collaborators
The work
behind the work.
Steve has a rare ability to take a deeply complex problem and make the path forward feel clear, practical, and achievable.
He brings together strong product sense and compelling storytelling—helping teams see both what to build and why it matters.
Connect
Good problems
welcome.
For thoughtful conversations about ambitious products, hard technical domains, and the future of product leadership.
Connect on LinkedIn