Hania B. Demai product lead & technologist
Portrait of Hania B. Demai

I’m Hania, a product lead and strategist. I help organisations work out what’s worth building, then get it built and adopted: strategy, innovation and transformation, mostly in industries where none of that is simple, like financial services or pharma.

I came up through the startup world (incubators, a thesis on business model innovation, a habit of building things myself) and I’ve spent the last ten years bringing that way of working into some of the largest companies in Europe and Asia. I’m French, based in London, and I’ve worked across the UK, Europe, Africa and Asia Pacific.

what drives me

Solving problems. I love a messy situation, a room of smart people who each see a different piece of it, and the moment when it clicks into a plan everyone believes in. That goes for strategy and product decisions as much as for people and teams. I care about making a difference that lasts: a team that runs well, a product people use, a change that outlives my contract.

I’ve gone out of my way to keep the work varied. I’ve worked across enough industries and enough types of organisation that I pattern-match fast, and I’ve usually seen a version of your problem somewhere else already.

how i work

I start by understanding the business’s strategic goals and priorities, connect with stakeholders, and build an understanding of what’s getting in the way. That could be a strategy question, a product-market fit problem, a new commercial opportunity to size up, a team that needs to work differently, or all of those at once. I look at it from enough angles to form a view quickly, and then I get into the work.

Day to day, it varies. I might be writing requirements in the morning and presenting to a steering committee after lunch, or running feasibility with engineers before anyone commits budget. I work across functions, I keep teams nimble and aligned, and I balance governance with agility so things move at the right pace.

the full toolkit

Product strategy
Vision and roadmaps · go-to-market · pricing and business models · business cases · market research and competitive analysis · multi-market rollout · proposition development · customer segmentation.
Product ownership & delivery
Backlog management and prioritisation · sprint planning · user testing · requirements, user stories and acceptance criteria · Agile, SAFe, Scrum and BDD (Certified ScrumMaster) · workshop facilitation.
Technical: AI & APIs
AI product design (agentic, proprietary models, human-in-the-loop) · API product management · Open Banking · solution scoping with engineering teams · prompt engineering.
Innovation & experimentation
Emerging technology assessment · design thinking · rapid prototyping and MVPs · lean business model validation · user research · POC design.
Transformation
Platform and data migration · operating model design · change management.
Risk & compliance
Risk management · data governance · compliance-driven product design · EU AI Act, GDPR, MiFID II, PSD2, EU AML.
Leadership & influence
Executive communication · strategic advisory to senior leadership · stakeholder management · hiring, mentoring and coaching.
for the record
  • MSc Management, Lund University, Sweden (grade A, top 5%)
  • BA International Relations, Malmö University, Sweden
  • Venture Challenge, Venture Lab, Geneva
certifications & courses
  • Chief AI Officer programme, elvtr
  • Certified ScrumMaster, Scrum Alliance
  • Creative AI, Intuit Lab
  • Intro to AI Product Design, elvtr
  • Fundamentals of Generative AI, Microsoft
  • Digital Product Management, University of Virginia
  • Investment Management Certificate Unit 1, CFA Institute
  • Behaviour-Driven Development
  • web development and Python foundations

beyond the day job

Most evenings there’s something on the go that has nothing to do with a client. I have always made things outside of work: music, code, hardware that may or may not get finished.

Lately the loudest channel is AI: tools and agents I build for myself, experiments that occasionally turn into real products.

I also produce music and sound-engineer my own tracks in Logic, start to finish. And on the kitchen table sits a half-soldered hardware project that is in a constant state of being nearly finished.

If that’s the conversation you’d rather have, the contact form works for that too.

Hania in the studio, at the keyboards
in the studio
the company

The business behind this site is Viver Studio Ltd, my company registered in England and Wales. Contracting, fractional engagements and workshops all run through it, inside or outside IR35.

If any of that sounds like what you need, let’s talk.

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