Cameron Henkes
Player-Coach, 0-to-1 Product Builder, Brisbane, Australia
Player-coach who builds product functions from 0 to 1. I design, I code, and I push directly to production. Over 8+ years I've shipped products across government (25.3M users), healthcare, fintech, and enterprise AI, always staying hands-on while leading cross-functional teams. My work sits at the intersection of design craft, data science, and AI implementation: products that feel effortless while delivering measurable impact. I call this approach Experience Flow.
Selected Work
Case studies across design craft, AI product delivery, and measurable business impact.
Emesent: Nine Problems, Two Designers, One Public Beta
First product design lead for an autonomous mapping and robotics company. Built research operations from zero, synthesised 3,000+ data points into 5 customer mindsets, and designed everything from cloud software to underground mining safety. Defence contracts and a Trimble partnership followed.
Strike Analytics: 13 Pivots, Zero Revenue, and the Method That Survived
Co-founded an AI analytics startup on $125K. Four founders, 14 months, 13 pivots, zero paying customers. The company failed. The methodology didn't.
Taxfix: Building a Feature for Users I Couldn't Interview
Designed a 0-to-1 tax pre-fill feature from Brisbane, working European nights during Covid, in a language I didn't speak. Hit 44% opt-in against a 20% target.
Sesame: Proving Market Demand Before Building the Infrastructure
Senior Product Designer across growth and commercial teams at a Google Ventures-backed healthcare marketplace. Helped secure GV investment through metric uplift and a GrubHub-inspired market expansion strategy.
AI Digital Advisor: From POC to Production for 4.5M Users
Led design and delivery of a multi-agent AI advisory system for a major Australian insurance comparison platform. Contracted through Pathfindr with a 5-person squad, reporting directly to the client's CEO.
Experience
Leading product design across Emesent's software portfolio including Omnimap and Aura. Managing design function while partnering with engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to deliver enterprise solutions for mining, infrastructure, and defence.
Consulting practice accelerating founders and product teams through psychology-driven design and AI implementation. Specialising in converting complex problems into seamless experiences with measurable business outcomes.
Co-founded AI platform from zero to production. Built and managed team of 11 across four countries. Architected ML framework compressing insight generation from 15+ hours to under 1 hour, addressing a $1.3 trillion market inefficiency.