Shipping three products in 2026

Mike Johnston

I build the product and the platform under it.

Three-time founder with three exits. Platform leader at Meta, Amazon, and Stripe. I pioneered what the industry now calls Forward Deployed Engineering, and this year I went back to building: three live products, run on an agentic operating model I designed myself.

Connect on LinkedIn Full history and contact live there.

Meta amazon stripe Electronic Arts

Now building

Three products, shipped this year.

After Stripe, I left to build full-time and go deep on agentic technology with my own hands, not in program docs. TrailConvoy and Outside Eats are live with real users. The first game arrives in November, which takes me back to my entrepreneurial roots in gaming. Each one has taught me something a slide deck never would.

Multi-tenant SaaS · Paying customers

TrailConvoy

A full website and back office for off-road clubs. Six spreadsheets and a group chat, replaced by one admin built for treasurers, secretaries, and trail bosses.

One adminmembers, dues, waivers, events, email, analytics

Freefor clubs up to 20 members, no card

Back to my roots

My first company, Soholaunch, built one of the first drag-and-drop website builders. TrailConvoy takes that idea to the next level for modern times: every club gets its own site and a complete back office, running on multi-tenant infrastructure built for real production load.

Stripe ConnectEmail automationDigital waiversCustom domainsClub analytics

See it under the hood

How it's built

Club members and visitors

CloudflareCDN · WAF · DNS

TrailConvoy control planeTenant provisioning · multi-tenant orchestration

AWS US-West live

Load balancerAuto-scalerCompute · AlphaCompute · BravoSQL · replicatedS3 object storage

⇄async
replication

AWS US-East next phase

Load balancerAuto-scalerCompute · AlphaCompute · BravoSQL · replicatedS3 object storage

Payments · StripeEmail delivery

9:41

Consumer discovery · Web, iPhone, iPad, Android

Outside Eats

A food guide for the SF Peninsula: new openings, farmers markets, food events, and city-by-city picks from Daly City to Palo Alto.

1,500+restaurants across 20+ cities

~$50/momodeled cost for 180M monthly video views

The product call

A vertical video feed only works if it is cheap enough to keep running. I designed the transcoding, R2 delivery, and preloading around the cost model first. On iPad, every screen gets a real landscape layout, not a stretched phone.

Cloudflare R2Multi-rendition videoLayered cachingNative preloadingSmart Filter

outside-eats.com

Baby Dragon Sanctuary gameplay: a teal baby dragon flying over a cliffside nest

Arriving November 2026

Indie game studio · Founded 2026

Soup Dumpling Software

Cozy, bite-sized games for iPhone, iPad, and Android. Small games, big filling, with something wonderful hidden in the middle.

Title oneBaby Dragon Sanctuary

Zero stressmade for a coffee break or one more round

The product call

Small games live or die in the first few minutes, so this one opens on a moment: hatching the first dragon egg in ages. From there you rebuild the sanctuary and follow the story. It is a return to where my career started, with everything I have learned since.

babydragonsanctuary.com

How I build

Agents do the work. A human ships it.

I run my products with Jisoo, an AI head of engineering I built. Requests come in on Slack. I make three decisions. Jisoo plans, builds, reviews, and stages the rest. It is Forward Deployed Engineering, the approach I ran at Meta and Stripe, applied to agents.

Request

Anyone on the team asks for something in Slack.

Triage

Splits it into separate asks and names each one. Never sees code.

Plan

Reads the codebase and writes the plan.

You approve

Build + review

Builds in an isolated copy. Independent review, then a re-review of the fixes.

Stage

Merges, deploys to staging, runs a smoke test.

You approve

Ship

A human ships to production. Jisoo can read prod, never write to it.

jisoo-aiyour new head of engineering · early access for growing teams 0 open inbound ports1 deploy key per repo2 reviews of every build3 decisions, all yours jisoo-ai.com →

Every morning: log review, security audit, and backup report Every night: database and site backups to off-box storage

How I think

A few rules I actually run on.

Written down years ago for the teams I led, and still true.

Shipped is the floor.

The product gets better after it is out the door, not before. Iteration is an action; endless planning is a delay.

70 percent is usually the whole decision.

The last 30 percent tends to cost more than it returns. Motion over perfection.

Bad news travels fastest.

If the plan is not working, it is in the open before the next meeting, not after it.

Tell me the outcome, not the method.

Agree on the impact and how we will measure it. Then let the team loose on the how.

Career

Founder, then platform. Now both.

The founder chapter taught me how small teams ship and what it means to own the customer. Meta, Amazon, and Stripe taught me to do it across continents and billions of people.

0 → 1

Forward Deployed Engineering strategy, authored and proven

Proved it on a flagship enterprise API migration, and began an agentic migration framework.

Stripe

Principal TPM, Forward Deployed Engineering

2025 to 2026

−35%

operating cost in a two-year global migration across 16 teams

Accountable to S-Team. Peak p99 latency down 20%. Buy Again repeat purchases up 8%.

Amazon

Principal TPM, Personalization

2023 to 2025

80 titles

in 10 months, with 5 studios on three continents

Executive Producer for Amazon Glow. Took cadence from 1 to 6 games a month. Disney, Marvel, Nat Geo, PBS, Mattel.

Amazon

Principal TPM, Interactive Services

2022 to 2023

+400%

global partnerships in 18 months with APAC-First

Field-embedded releases before the term FDE existed. Games SDK 2.0. Taught the TPM Leadership Bootcamp as the org grew 20 to 200.

Topgolf Media

VP of Development

2014 to 2017

9 months

to ship an $80M AAA game scoped for 18

Four international teams. Launch Director across 9 departments. Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline.

Electronic Arts

Senior Development Director

2011 to 2014

daily players at peak on a social games platform

40-person team, $2M budget. Diner Dash. Then built Playdom's SF studio before the Disney acquisition.

PlayFirst · Playdom

Director of Engineering

2010 to 2011

100K

daily players two weeks after Reef Life launched

One of the first aquarium games on Facebook. Acquired by Playdom, later part of Disney.

Storybook Anytime

Co-Founder and CTO

2007 to 2010

Three companies founded. Three sold.

Sold 2004

Soholaunch

Buyout

One of the first drag-and-drop website builders, licensed by global hosting providers. Built on PHP and MySQL before most people had heard of either.

Sold 2007

MajikWidget

Private buyer

An eCommerce widget platform on the LAMP stack with an SEO method that kept working, client after client.

Sold 2009

Storybook Anytime

Acquired by Playdom, later part of Disney

Reef Life, one of the first aquarium games on Facebook, went from 0 to 100K daily players in two weeks on a single $200-a-month server.

Toolkit

What I bring to the table.

Product person first. Hands-on engineer for real. Principal TPM by trade. Here is the detail.

◎

Technical program management

What a TPM actually does, the way I run it.

Kickoff

PRD with system design, SMART goals, whiteboard milestones, scope with the dev team, RACI per workstream, escalation paths, and one wiki as the source of truth.

Dependencies

Map every cross-team dependency before it bites. Sequence phased rollouts. Unblock 16 teams that do not report to you.

Execution

A live RAID log: risks, actions, issues, decisions. Always asking: what will break, where is the cliff, what happens if?

Exec reporting

The weekly "Chuck Norris Report": TL;DR for execs, what is trying to kill us, green/yellow/red milestones, burn-downs, and the VP asks.

Forecasting

Ship dates called to within 10 days, a year out. Knowing how a scope change today moves a date three weeks from now.

Launch

Launch director across 9 departments: load balancing, marketing beats, legal approvals, first-party sign-offs, three regions at once.

Quality gates

A three-phase review (visibility, prioritization, cadence) that took a catalog from 1 to 6 releases a month.

Rhythm of business

Weekly updates, biweekly exec reviews, monthly business reviews, retros and postmortems that feed the next kickoff.

✦

Product

From the problem to the store listing.

Customer discoveryProblem framingPRDsRoadmapsPricing and packagingFree-tier funnelsOnboarding flowsReferral programsRetention loopsAnalytics and KPIsUX and interaction designiPad and tablet layoutsAccessibilityContent and SEOApp Store and Google Play launchesStore art and listingsPromo video and trailersPartner programs

{ }

Hands-on engineering

I write, ship, and operate production code.

PHPJavaScriptHTML and CSSSwift and StoreKitActionScript 3Adobe AIRMySQLPostgresMongoDBRedisREST API designSDK designMulti-tenant SaaSStripe ConnectWebhooksPush notificationsiOS and Android buildsFFmpeg and video transcodingGit and GitHubAutomated testsCI and deploy scripts

☁

Infrastructure and ops

Run it, secure it, back it up, sleep at night.

AWS EC2 and LightsailS3Load balancingAuto-scalingReplicated SQLCross-region replicationCloudflare CDNWAF and bot rulesDNSCloudflare R2Edge cachingLinuxApacheTLS certificatesTailscale private networkingDockerCron and schedulersNightly off-box backupsLog review and alertingSecurity auditsCost modeling

⚙

Agentic AI

Agents in production, with fences.

Claude CodeCodexMulti-agent role designLeast-privilege tool accessHuman approval gatesIsolated build sandboxesIndependent code review agentsScheduled agentsSlack-driven workflowsMCP toolsPrompt and context designAgentic migration frameworksForward-deployed agents

◆

Leadership

Influence ages better than authority.

Teams up to 50Three continentsS-Team programsInfluence without authorityHiring and interview designPerformance reviews and calibrationTPM bootcamp instructorMentoringStudio and partner managementInvestor reviewsDisagree and commitBad news first

◉

Domains

Where I have shipped.

Games: indie to AAASocial platformsDeveloper platformsE-commerce and personalizationPaymentsEnterprise migrationsConsumer hardwareLicensed IP partnershipsSaaS for communitiesLocal discoveryAPAC, EMEA, North America

Recruiters and hiring managers

Put me to work on your team.

I am ready now for Director of Engineering, Director of TPM, Principal TPM, and Forward Deployed Engineering leadership roles. You get product judgment, hands-on engineering, and program leadership that has run across continents. The fastest way to start that conversation is LinkedIn.

Director of EngineeringDirector of TPMPrincipal TPMFDE leadershipAgentic AI programs

Let's talk on LinkedIn