---
title: About Charlie Holland
slug: bio
summary: Who Charlie is, what he does, and his background.
url: https://charlieholland.com
---

# About me

I'm Charlie Holland. Product strategy, design, and the code in between. I work as a design-engineering hybrid, taking products from zero to one through research, product strategy, interface design, and a real share of the code that ships them.

Currently redefining signal and agentic intelligence at Omniscient AI. Formerly at McKinsey and QuantumBlack.

## Background

- **Omniscient AI** (Jul 2025 to present) · Founding Product Designer. Started during the transition out of McKinsey. Joined as the fourth employee, with no design function and a rough POC, and Renault's entire monitoring stack was retired eight months later: three vendors consolidated into one platform, €700k a year in retired spend, and signal vetting cut from multi-day reports to under 15 minutes. Two paying design partners, Renault and On, whose intelligence now briefs up to board level. Designed the signal model the product is built on (a live event that once threw off 80-plus signals now reads as roughly 20 topics) and the tiered-rigour agent behaviour for Sentinels, where AI filters around 70% of the noise traditional keyword tools would have passed through.
- **McKinsey & Company / QuantumBlack** (Feb 2021 to Oct 2025) · Lead Product Designer & Strategist. Three builds I'm proudest of: a smart-pallet cold-chain venture that landed five paying pilots inside twelve months against a $50m+ global opportunity; a farm planning service that took working out what applies to your land from a 6-to-12-month process to under 10 minutes, later launched publicly by NSW DPIRD, the renamed DPI, as myFarmPlanner with a projected $3.9m five-year benefit; and a generative AI tool for one of APAC's longest-running luxury brands, at an estimated 3 to 7% gross profit uplift.
- **Hypothesis Consulting** (Apr 2019 to Jun 2021) · Experience Design Consultant. Wrapped up alongside the start at McKinsey. Embedded in client teams across financial services and government, finding the opportunities worth building through human-centred research and prototyping. Worked dual-track agile with engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders to ship validated working software, and left clients able to carry the work on themselves.
- Earlier: freelance product design, and a junior design role where I built Australia's first end-to-end VR fan experience, for Brisbane Heat cricket fans.

## How I work

Get technical, build alongside engineers, and crank it. Bring structure to the chaos, stay pragmatic, and hold the bar on rigour.

## Skills and tools

- **Product and strategy:** product strategy, futures thinking, 0-to-1 product definition.
- **Design:** UX/UI, design systems, prototyping.
- **AI product:** agent behaviour design, AI trust and evidence patterns, human-in-the-loop review. Actively deepening: cost, latency and precision tradeoffs.
- **Engineering (all actively deepening):** AI and agent engineering, evals and prompt regression testing, LLM app backends (FastAPI and LangChain), signal ingestion and ranking, production frontend (React and TypeScript), and automated testing and CI.
- **Research and facilitation:** ethnographic and customer research, service design, workshop facilitation.

Day to day I work in Figma, Miro, Storybook, Playwright, Vitest, Linear, Jira, Confluence, Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub.

## Education

- UX Design Immersive, General Assembly (2018 to 2019)
- BA Communication Design, Billy Blue School of Design (2012 to 2015)

## Writing

I write about product and AI on Substack, at carlholland.substack.com. Recent pieces cover making prompt cost and intent visible, designing AI products people can operate rather than just automate, and applying AI only where it earns its place.

## For hire

Yes. I take on a small number of founding design partnerships alongside Omniscient. The best fit is 0-to-1 AI products that need product, design, and engineering judgement in one head.

## How to reach me

- Email hello@charlieholland.com. It's the fastest route and it reaches me directly.
- LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-holland, good for a message or an introduction.
- GitHub at https://github.com/CarlHolland93, if you want to see what I ship.
- Substack at https://carlholland.substack.com for the writing.