Discovery and strategic de-risking
The what and the why, settled before anyone writes code. I don't design interfaces, I kill hypotheses. Behavioural psychology and competitive benchmarking to find the gap that actually exists.
Portfolio / 2026
Product Manager · ex-Designer · ex-Developer
Most PMs pick a side. I've shipped from all three.
I write the spec, price the build and cut the half that doesn't matter. Senal Wijeratne — developer, then designer, now product manager.
Fig. 1 — Senal Wijeratne. Product manager. Writes the spec, reads the pull request.
currently building Luma Finance
0→1 product
Behavioural UX
Growth & CRO
Design systems
Telehealth
No-code SaaS
Fintech
Capabilities
Where I earn the title.
Four things I do better than the average product manager. Two of them are the reason people hire me.
Systems thinking and logic engineering
Decisions engineers and users both understand. I bridge how a system works under the hood and how it should feel to use. Business logic, technical constraints, edge cases: I translate all of it.
Growth and operational excellence
Velocity that shows up in revenue, not in a burndown chart. I build for the bottom line. Conversion funnels, standardised product workflows, design ops.
Stakeholder and roadmap leadership
Technical debt and MVP trade-offs named out loud. Connective tissue between founders, engineering and design. Vision turned into prioritised, production-ready requirements.
Most PMs come from one discipline.
I've shipped as a developer, led as a designer, and now I connect both worlds. Fewer handoff gaps, faster decisions, and nobody has to translate for me.
Selected work
Five products. Five hard calls.
Each one turned on a decision that was unpopular, expensive, or both. Those are the parts worth reading.
I cut bank integrations out of V1 on purpose.
Every finance app treats money as a maths problem. Luma treats it as a behavioural one, so V1 ships a daily reflection loop and no ledger. Bank sync would have dragged the product straight back into transaction tracking, which is the exact pattern it exists to break. Solo-built, in progress.
02
Pronto Pilates
I told the Director of Technology the tax model was the blocker, not the UI.
AU/NZ GST was baked into billing, onboarding and membership logic. I mapped the localisation work end to end and shipped a region-aware signup funnel, so US entry happened without a platform rewrite. Six-plus BI reports gave leadership its first real view of member lifecycle health. 03 CamaraderieI cut live audio and video out of the MVP.
The founders wanted a synchronous buddy system. Building it would have eaten most of the engineering runway before we knew whether men would open up in text at all. Cutting it reduced estimated engineering load by 40% and shipped the closed beta months earlier. They opened up. 04 TheraseeI argued for the video system over the marketing tools.
Neither incumbent let a therapist take notes during a live call. Until therapists stopped reaching for Zoom, Therasee was never going to be their primary workspace. The side-by-side clinical workspace shipped, and early adopters reported an estimated 8 to 10 hours a week of admin recovered. 05 AppspotrI rebuilt the first-app journey instead of shipping more features.
Time-to-value was the whole problem: users churned before they built anything. Compressing that path contributed to a 40% increase in paying customers, a 30% lift in active engagement, and a 25% cut in time-to-market once design and engineering stopped working in silos.
How I think
Three things I actually believe.
Not a framework. Three positions I've been proven right about often enough to keep holding.
Simplicity is a discovery problem
Most features get over-engineered because the real problem was never dug up properly. Understand the actual issue and the solution almost always gets smaller, not bigger.
Users don't care how it works
They care that it works. The instinct to surface technical sophistication is a team problem dressed up as a product decision. Strip it back until someone's grandmother gets it.
The friction is rarely in the flow
Nobody abandons a product because a button sat in the wrong place. They leave because of how it made them feel. The most important product decisions are emotional ones, and most teams never reach them because they stop at the interface.
Get in touch
Let's build something worth using.
A founder who needs a product thinking partner, a team with a problem worth solving, or someone who just wants to argue about roadmaps. All three are good reasons to write.
— Senal W.