Padel matching app — Miami (2026–present). Solo-built SMS coordination system for finding right-level padel players. End-to-end build: matching engine, full lifecycle from invite through post-game payment, segmented engagement tiers driven by actual reply behavior. Two-month progressive build, 31 active players, automated games shipping weekly, revenue moving. The discipline that transfers: cutting scope to what earns its place, phased build order, dry-run gates before anything irreversible, decisions logged so the system survives context resets — the operator's hand on the queue during the messy middle.
Chris Gueits
("Gates")
Fractional senior product leadership for companies building through transition.
Remote·Miami-based·Available 10–25 hrs/week
Positioning
I work with founders and senior leaders who are building something hard — a new product, a new motion, a transition to AI-native operations — and need a senior product brain in the room without hiring for one full-time.
The work is mostly judgment — and judgment is built from three things: understanding the customer better than anyone in the room, aligning product with company vision, and choosing the few bets that matter. AI has made building cheap. Knowing what to build has gotten harder, not easier. That's the gap I fill.
The work I'm best at is separating signal from noise. seeing what's underneath, what's unsaid, what people can't yet articulate about their own behavior and desire.
Four-time founder. Princeton. Most recent engagement: senior product and operating partner to a former Google executive.
What I'm hired to do
Concrete engagement shapes. Each one is a real piece of work I've done or am qualified to lead.
Senior product partner to a founder-CEO. Weekly cadence. Roadmap discipline, prioritization, user research design, the hard conversations about what's not working. For founders who are technical or sales-led and need a product counterweight.
GTM design and implementation. Helping founders find the first repeatable sales or growth loop — and turning that loop into a system the team can run without them. Positioning, pricing, distribution, and the operational machinery underneath. For companies that have signal but not yet system.
AI integration judgment. Helping teams figure out where AI actually changes the work and where it's noise. What to automate, what to leave human, what to build in-house, what to buy. Less buzzword, more discrimination.
0→1 product strategy. Sitting with a technical founder, doing the user discovery they don't have time for, shaping the first version of the product before the team scales around it.
Operating partner to a complex leader. For founders or executives whose distinctive cognitive style is the source of their advantage but also the source of their bottleneck. Bringing structure and clarity without flattening what makes them effective. Part product judgment, part executive partnership. The shape of my last engagement.
If your situation doesn't quite match one of these, send a brief anyway. The shape of the work tends to find itself.
Recent work
Senior product and operating partner — former Google executive (2024–2025). Hired to operationalize a portfolio of ventures around the principal's cognitive style. The work was diagnosis-heavy: figuring out which projects had real signal, which were drains, where their time created the most leverage. Designed lightweight operating systems that worked with their attention patterns rather than against them.
Strategic GTM consultant — Airbnb (2015). One of a small external team of operators brought in to solve an intractable supply-side problem. Worked independently to design a new acquisition methodology, finished top of team in results, and was asked to train the rest of the cohort in the protocol — which was later templated and scaled globally to address supply challenges in other markets.
Founder & CEO — Rison (2018–2023). Built a virtual group coaching product from zero. Pivoted from in-person retreats to a digital subscription with $2,193 LTV and 4.7/5 satisfaction across 500+ sessions. Average customer lifespan 19 months — six times the industry average. Owned product, growth, and the mission-driven culture that made retention possible.
Product strategy — Mobile Accord (2012). Onboarding redesign drove 304% growth in active users. Activation campaign work drove 307% growth in core engagement metrics. Identified strategic partnerships that cut $2M project opex by 67%. The kind of unglamorous product judgment that compounds.
Founder & Chairman — Roots of Hope (2003–2013). Built a national community of 900+ leaders across 99 universities — remote-first and distributed before either was a category. Led a team of volunteer leaders without formal authority, designed programming featuring former heads of state, and shaped a movement that ran for a decade.
Background
Princeton — History, certificate in Spanish. McGraw Scholarship. 100-page senior thesis. Varsity football, 2006 Ivy League Champions, four-year letter winner, Special Teams Captain.
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth — Business Bridge Program (intensive MBA curriculum).
Teach For America — bilingual classroom teacher and district data manager, Los Angeles. Synthesized district performance data into board-level reports.
Native fluency in Spanish. Significant professional experience in Latin America.
Four-time founder across non-profit, consumer wellness, consumer mobile, and consulting.
Builds independently with no-code and AI-assisted tools.
How I work
Five things I commit to in every engagement.
Direct user contact in week one. I don't form opinions from secondhand reports. I get on calls with the people whose behavior we're trying to understand.
Diagnosis before prescription. Most product problems are misdiagnosed. The first deliverable is usually a clearer problem statement than the one I was hired against.
Ship the smallest real thing first. Working software, even ugly, beats decks. Especially in AI-native work, where the gap between idea and prototype is now hours.
Make the team better, not make myself necessary. Fractional engagements work when the team gets sharper. I leave behind operating systems, not dependencies.
Transparent on what I don't know. I don't fake adjacent expertise. When something's outside my range, I say so and help find the right person.
Fit
Good fit if:
- Pre-Seed through Series B, up to roughly 80 people
- Founder-CEO or senior leader who wants a peer in the room, not a vendor
- Remote-first, comfortable with async
- Open to a senior outsider having real access in week one
- Building a product, redesigning a GTM motion, or navigating an AI transition
Not a fit if:
- You need full-time or on-site presence beyond occasional travel
- Procurement cycle longer than the engagement itself
- Looking for staff augmentation or pure execution capacity
- Looking for a coach or therapist; that's a different door on this site
The longer story
I grew up in Miami, the kind of Cuban kid who started his first business at fifteen because his family couldn't afford the football camps that would get him recruited. That hustle worked. Princeton. Ivy League championship. The American Dream.
What the resume doesn't show is the break.
A few days before I turned thirty, the company I'd built and the relationship I'd been in both ended in the same week. I spent a day at rock bottom, watching myself from somewhere outside my body, asking the only honest question I had left: how did I get here?
What I learned in the years after that has shaped every venture and every engagement since. Outcomes are not in your control. Your relationship to your own thinking is. A process orientation is. The work in front of you, done well, is the only thing you actually own.
The best operators I know — the ones who stay sharp through hard cycles — are not the ones with the most frameworks. They're the ones who know themselves well enough to think clearly under pressure, and disciplined enough to keep showing up to the work when the outcome is uncertain.
I bring that to the work. Strategic clarity and emotional steadiness are not separate skills. They're the same skill in different lighting.
If any of this resonates, the door is open.