Talha Usmani. Product builder operating between business strategy, engineering, and AI. I figure out what to ship, then I ship it. Currently in Toronto, working across the public sector and shipping side projects under my own name.
I started in business. B.Com in Delhi, then Business Insights & Analytics in Toronto. Along the way I kept landing in the same spot: between strategy, technical teams, and stakeholder chaos. I stopped running from it.
I’ve worked inside high-growth Indian startups where speed is the only currency, and inside Canadian public sector where one wrong move has political consequences. That range trained the muscle that’s hardest to teach: knowing when the room says ‘go’ vs when the room says ‘don’t miss’.
Today I build with AI. Not because it’s loud, but because thoughtfully deployed it changes how teams operate. I’m not a traditional engineer. I’m a business mind that ships.
I’ve driven product adoption across 57 organizations inside a regulated public-sector environment. Stakeholder politics, change management, and the long arc of moving institutions are familiar terrain.
I architect with LLMs, no-code, and APIs. Prompt pipelines, AI agents that QA other agents, deployed web apps. I think in systems first, features second.
I shape the metrics, dashboards, and narratives that help leaders make confident calls. Drill from sector-wide posture to a single school board gap without losing the through-line.
School board leads to Ministry executives. I build trust in rooms where “no” is the default. Most of product is convincing the room. I’ve done a lot of convincing.
A free, AI-powered case study simulator. 30,000+ configurable cases. Built solo, end to end. The clearest single proof of how I think about product, AI, and building.
Drove adoption of a provincial cybersecurity program from 17 to 57 school boards. Rolled out Slack as the cross-organization spine, then renegotiated licensing to cut the platform cost by 75%.
Co-led the productization of an open-source SIEM (Wazuh) into a white-labeled, client-ready security product. Owned roadmap, feature prioritization, and the boring, decisive work of getting from 0 to launch.
Self-hosted Slack bot. Three daily check-ins with a deliberately tough-love persona. Solved a real problem of mine, then turned it into a tool I could share. Beta with a small group now.
Defined the metrics and the storytelling spine for a PowerBI dashboard used by Ministry executives. Drill from sector posture to the gaps inside any single school board.
If a feature ships and the metric doesn’t move, it didn’t ship. I write the success line before the spec.
Most product problems are systems problems wearing a UI mask. Map the system, then design the screen.
The fastest way to know if an idea is real is to put it in front of one user. Strong opinions, weak roadmaps.
Some rooms reward speed. Some reward precision. Knowing which is which is most of the job.