--- title: About Charlie Holland slug: bio summary: Who Charlie is, what he does, his background, and how to reach him. url: https://charlieholland.com --- # About me I'm Charlie Holland. Product strategy, design, and the code in between. I work out what a business should automate, design the agents and systems that do it, and ship a real share of the code. Recent work runs across product strategy, agent design, business automation and design engineering, mostly taking products from zero to one. I don't hand designs over a wall. I'm the founding product designer at Omniscient AI, a signal intelligence platform. I was previously at McKinsey and QuantumBlack. ## Where I am now, exactly - Omniscient AI is my full-time role. I started there in July 2025 and I'm there now. - I have left McKinsey and QuantumBlack. I finished there in October 2025, and that chapter is closed. - The date ranges below overlap in two places, and both overlaps are real rather than errors. I started at Omniscient in July 2025 during the transition out of McKinsey, so July to October 2025 ran in parallel. Hypothesis Consulting wrapped up alongside the start at McKinsey in early 2021, the same way. - The best way to reach me is email at hello@charlieholland.com, or LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-holland. ## What I'm doing now I'm the founding product designer at Omniscient AI, a seed-stage signal intelligence company serving communications, risk, and brand teams. I joined as the fourth employee and only designer, with no design function in place, and I own the whole arc from product strategy to design to a real share of the code. Most of my time goes into the AI layer: how it earns analyst trust, surfaces its reasoning, and cites its sources rather than pretending to a certainty it doesn't have. ## Background - **Omniscient AI** (Jul 2025 to present, current role) · Founding Product Designer. Joined as the fourth employee, built the design function from zero, and took the product from POC to production: an end-to-end signal intelligence workflow spanning sensing, triage, reporting, and collaboration. Designed the signal model the whole product is built on, and the agent behaviour behind Sentinels. Lead designer for both design partners, Renault and On. A live event that once threw off 80-plus signals now reads as roughly 20 topics. On Sentinels, deep-analysis alerts get a separate evidence check: an investigator drafts the claims and a vetter checks them against their sources. Keyword-only and keyword-classified watches do not run that loop. Renault retired its entire monitoring stack inside eight months. Three vendors down to one, €700k a year in retired spend, signals vetted in under 15 minutes, and intelligence that now briefs up to the board. - **McKinsey & Company / QuantumBlack** (Feb 2021 to Oct 2025, finished) · 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 MVP that helped NSW farmers understand the planning requirements for their land, rated highly desirable by 18 of 20 pilot users, with a projected $3.9m five-year benefit, and the foundation for myFarmPlanner, whose later release won the 2025 PIA NSW Technology and Digital Innovation award; 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, finished, and it wrapped up alongside the start at McKinsey) · Experience Design Consultant. 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 worked on Heat VR, the Brisbane Heat's virtual reality app, which the club launched as a first for Australian sport. ## How I work I get technical, build alongside engineers, and crank it. Tools like Claude Code and Cursor moved the ceiling on what I can carry alone. The same hands that sketch a flow in Figma now ship the pull request behind it. ## Outside work Outside work I'm usually training for ultra marathons, so a big share of my spare time goes into long runs. I surf, and I get outdoors whenever I can. The rest goes into playing around with new and interesting technologies, which is where side projects like this site's chat come from. ## 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: the cost, latency and precision tradeoffs between them, with per-tier precision on Sentinels an area I want to validate. - **Engineering:** all actively deepening, and framed that way on purpose. AI and agent engineering (on Sentinels the pipeline engineering was the team's and my part was the behaviour spec), evals and prompt regression testing, LLM app backends with FastAPI and LangChain, which is what the backend behind this site's chat runs on, signal ingestion and ranking, production frontend in React and TypeScript, and automated testing and CI with Playwright, Vitest and Storybook. I ship frontend to production every week, but design and product are the headline claim and I'd rather undersell engineering depth than defend an overclaim. - **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. ## Working together I'm the founding product designer at Omniscient. If you're working on a hard 0-to-1 AI product problem and want to talk it through, email is the fastest route, hello@charlieholland.com. LinkedIn works for an introduction. ## 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. - Anything about me or how I work, ask me directly rather than going through Omniscient. Email and LinkedIn are the two routes I actually watch. There's no phone number, no calendar booking link, and no contact form anywhere on the site.