Ashley Porciuncula

Altt Productions

Managing Director + Managing Producer

November 2024 - present

→ Bringing agile development and product-market-fit validation from tech into genre filmmaking, to de-risk greenlight decisions. → Line managing a cross-disciplinary team of five across writing, production and previsualisation, while holding producing, operations, technical and statutory responsibility for the company. Coaching creative collaborators, including outright AI sceptics, into using AI on their own terms, so it widens what they're capable of rather than replacing their judgement. → Producing the full slate: two feature films plus a dual-media production compressing 300+ branching outcomes into a single shoot, released as both a playable interactive title and a feature film. → Won paid development work from a BAFTA-winning games publisher on the strength of our pitch materials and documentation, with the audience-validation approach cited as a reason. Two agreements across two projects, plus the Creative UK Investment Readiness Programme. → Built and shipped three internal products used across the slate. Clarice, an AI system modelling audience impact from beats in context. Movie Stacks, a live interactive pitch platform. Scare Science, the research library underpinning both. Built in React and TypeScript, with CSV and Markdown content anyone can edit. → Built the validation system the studio decides on, bringing audience testing forward to before anything is written, using forced choice, MaxDiff and implicit affect measures. → Built the operating apparatus from zero: fifty playbooks and templates, a collaborator lifecycle system, a legally reviewed contract suite, a library of custom AI skills wired into Notion, Slack, Asana, Gmail, Drive and Miro running daily task and reporting work, and the AI position and ethics policy, including a hard line against AI-generated content reaching a paying audience. → Raised and protected the company's initial SEIS financing through a change of creative direction, using the gap to build infrastructure.

Ashley Porciuncula

Production + Operations Advisory for Creative Startups

July 2025 - March 2026

Fractional product and operations leadership and advisory for tech startups and global companies, now increasingly applied to companies and individuals in the creative industries. → Brought on board to manage a film festival with six weeks to go at 5% ticket sales. Curated the event programme, led creative and marketing, and developed partnerships including advertisers and food and drink sponsorships. Sold out Bristol's Megascreen IMAX Cinema, with red carpet harbourside afterparty, and press coverage in Bristol24/7 and Bristol Creative Industries.

Forum

Fractional VP of Product + Visual Designer

March 2024 - March 2026

→ Carried the product through prototype, launch and onboarding, then supported leadership to decide what carried through a full pivot to an AI-native platform, while existing users kept running. → Designed and implemented a low-code A/B testing system to validate product hypotheses rapidly, lifting conversion 18% over three months and cutting development spend by 70% by testing smaller, iterative changes internally. → Moved the development team from six- to eight-week release cycles to continuous delivery, rebuilding the delivery process and QA cadence to support it. Built AI checks that test product requirements against a fixed factor set before development, working like unit tests for product, plus AI extraction of QA test requirements from product instructions, which widened use case coverage without growing the QA team. → Designed AI features and wrote the prompt engineering behind them during the pivot, including the first scoping work on AI-assisted wireframing and the systems that held the design language consistent across the team. → Ran the delivery cadence with an outsourced development agency, alongside a structured product operations wiki and a formal QA process. → Contributed to a $5.3M seed round that closed during this role.

Ashley Porciuncula

Fractional Head of Product and Startup Advisor

July 2011 - March 2026

→ Focus areas: Product strategy, operations, go-to-market, product-market-fit testing, user research, road mapping, and prioritisation. → Clients have included the European Space Agency, Shazam, MTV, CBBC, Nokia, Amazon Web Services, and Big Robot Games. → Client Highlight: Cut development and production costs by 30% through smarter budgeting, resourcing, and vendor negotiation, without compromising creative standards. → Client Highlight: Reduced production times by 80% for a B2C media company through process and communications improvements. → Redesigned the flagship product for a global whiteboard-animation software company, reaching 2M+ users across 160 countries, and converted the results into a cross-product design language across a three-product suite. → Ran gamification and design-thinking workshops for companies and professional organisations including a Stanford University startup accelerator. Published articles on leadership, entrepreneurship, and design for Thrive Global, Adobe, and Forbes.

→ Built a talent-development production model and ran it across four fully funded short films, hiring and mentoring 60+ emerging cast and crew into full IMDb credits and revenue points, with talent drawn from the University of Bristol, UWE Bristol, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and the National Youth Theatre. → Financed the programme myself and partnered with local universities and training organisations for equipment access and on-set training, which is what made four fully funded films possible on a micro-budget. → Directed and produced Mission Plan (2024) with creative partner Matt Merkovich. The Untimely Revenge of Waffle was covered by Bristol Live, and the work earned official selections at the Lift-Off Global Network (Sessions and London), Greenflash International, and the New York International Women's Film Festival.

Orbital Chat

Co-Founder + CEO

May 2020 - January 2023

→ Built and led a multi-disciplinary team spanning technical, marketing and operational roles, owning hiring end to end through onboarding of nine employees across four countries. Line managed five of them, running KPIs, monthly reviews, one-to-ones and fortnightly sprint planning, while establishing a remote-first culture. → Led product, pricing strategy, compliance and marketing as sole decision-maker in a field of roughly 100 perceived competitors and 10 truly direct ones, closing a fully subscribed SEIS round plus additional EIS funding. → Ran payroll and pension auto-enrolment for nine employees across four countries, alongside right-to-work checks and employment administration. → Achieved #2 Product of the Day and a five-star rating on Product Hunt, as well as 4.6-star ratings on Capterra and Trustpilot. Product users included teams at Google, PwC, Huboo, Slite, Ghost, Northwestern University, and Carnegie Mellon.

Real Vision

Operations Consultant + Fractional Chief Product Officer

August 2021 - January 2022

→ Expanded and led the product team through a new portfolio product's design and delivery, facilitating $12.5M in new recurring revenue. → Restructured the product function into small self-contained pods and line managed four product managers, directing their work toward their own goals and resourcing with career growth in mind. → Facilitated an 80% reduction in production times over a 3-month initiative, diagnosing where work was getting stuck between departments through workshops on vision alignment plus direct coaching, then rebuilding delivery-ops processes on the findings.

Cosound

Fractional Chief Product Officer + Head of Development

January 2020 - March 2021

→ Line managed the development team, building the delivery systems from scratch including sprint cadence, QA and release process, and extended runway roughly 30% through budgeting, resourcing and vendor negotiation. → Built the Influencer Score, an algorithmic value calculation across seven factors, deliberately designed so it could not be inflated by surface-level likes or bought followers. → Delivered a 200% increase in user retention while pivoting from web to mobile, reaching 4.9 stars on Google Play and 5.0 on the App Store, and featured on the cover of Music Week magazine. → Led the Pro subscription pivot, including Stripe-based billing integration, planned from the start and executed in just over three months. → Specified the product analytics dashboard end to end, defining roughly 25 metrics, each with its calculation and data source across growth, activation, retention and session depth, then instrumented the events needed to collect them.

huggg

VP of Product + Development

January 2018 - October 2019

→ Second hire after the founders. Grew the team to over 20 people within 18 months, including nine on Product Development, and line managed the full product development team including product managers, resourcing against career growth rather than delivery need alone. → Grew B2C purchases by 300% in six months through user experience improvements and supporting redemption locations, alongside user growth to 80,000 users in eight months. → Designed, built, and shipped a low-code B2B platform in two weeks, driving a 440% revenue increase over the following 60 days. → Owned the product reporting behind the monthly board pack, tracking the acquisition funnel from download through signed-up user to first and repeat paid send. → Recognised by Forbes as a leader of one of its Startups to Watch and achieved #2 ranking in the iMessage app store Food and Drink category.

Zoetis Inc.

Head of Product, Digital Innovation

June 2012 - November 2015

→ Ran the delivery portfolio for the Centre for Digital Innovation, roughly 20 mobile and web apps, and shipped nine of them end to end into market. These included VetSupport+, a veterinary digital ecosystem delivered through a single sign-on portal, and PetDialog+, an IoT wellness tracker taken from concept through launch with an external partner, coordinating app, hardware, brand and packaging. → Led a global migration to Jira and Confluence, introducing agile methods across the development environment. → Owned technical strategy across the portfolio, deciding native versus cross-platform per product, standardising the stack across teams, and handwriting the specifications for every product personally. Built a responsive UI kit and globally adopted brand guidelines for international releases.

Amazon Web Services

Experience Consultant + Front-End Developer

August 2013 - November 2013•aws.com

Temporary contract for UI design and development of Amazon WorkDocs, formerly Amazon Zocalo. Completed pre-launch assessment of the user experience and prioritisation of necessary improvements. Personally refactored a large percentage of the UI code, including full conversion of the existing desktop interactive website to responsive design.

SendMe, Inc.

Senior Developer + Front-End Lead

November 2010 - September 2012

→ Led the integration of front-end from new product acquisitions and streamlined merging processes, part of a 66% increase in revenue for primary applications. → Monitored conversion rates for partner flows. Designed and implemented a refactor of landing page flows for a partnership with Shazam, swiftly resulting in a 72% increase in monthly product subscriptions. → Designed and iterated on many of the company's web products and mobile applications. → Developed a system for easy and secure duplication of landing page flows and microsites, lowering development time for most reproducible tasks by up to 80%.

→ 9% overall revenue increase due to adding practice branding and digital services → Working alongside consultants within the medical field, I identified and upsold branding services, including multi-channel marketing solutions, web & interactive design and marketing material production. → Designed and developed custom web content management solutions directed toward the specific needs of private medical practices.

Taught classes with an average of 10- 15 students in Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Office, Database Management, and HTML & CSS.

→ Developed a tracking system to monitor success rates of all forms of print and multimedia advertising. Creation and implementation of e-correspondence program generating over 10,000 potential homebuyer contacts within the first 3 months. → Project managed major company website redesign, working closely with programmers. Managed and updated all content on the company website and subscription websites. → Creation of marketing materials, direct mailers and internet marketing. → Planning of promotional events, grand openings and other events with budgets of up to $60,000.