J. Dave Kelly Product Leader Vancouver, BC

Draws the play.
Runs the play.

player-coach (n.) — see: entire career ↘

Twenty years building products, teams and trust. Startup to nine figures, payments to payroll to proactive MRI — usually with a whiteboard marker in one hand.

← morale, on demand
CAF RESERVE VIVONET PAYFIRMA ROOMKEYPMS ZENEFITS PRENUVO SFU · MBA twenty years, one route your team?
THE SHORT VERSION

Build the thing. Build the team. Repeat.

I'm a product leader from Vancouver who has spent twenty years doing two jobs at once: drawing the play and running it. At Prenuvo I built Product, Design, QA, Data, IT, Security and Marketing from scratch, then helped scale the company from $400K to nine-figure annual revenue while 100K+ people across three countries got access to proactive MRI screening — with life-changing findings for roughly one patient in five. Before that: payments, payroll and hotel tech, from first prototype to platforms moving billions.

Player-coach isn't a title, it's a habit. When Prenuvo needed a marketing lead, I stepped in for a year: five times the qualified leads, self-serve booking up from under 10% to half of all appointments, new locations breaking even inside three months. Then I handed it off in good shape and went back to product. When the company needed someone to own privacy and responsible AI — a gap with company-ending stakes and nobody in the seat — I ran the same play: see the gap, step up, own it.

That's the pattern across twenty years. Do the work, build the people who do the work, get out of the way. So when my card started reading Senior Director of Privacy, Responsible AI & Data Protection Officer, some recruiters read it as a career change. It wasn't. It was the same move, run again. Keep scrolling.

career box score:
~25,000%
revenue growth, 5 yrs (Prenuvo)
$2B+
annual payroll processed (Zenefits)
100K+
members, 3 countries (Prenuvo)
30+
regions of privacy compliance
<10% 50%
self-serve bookings, in one year
THE LAST TWO YEARS

Written as a PRD. Because that's what it was.

People see “Privacy Officer” and assume I left product. In reality I took on the hardest product surface we had: trust. Here's that work, documented the way I actually ran it.

SHIPPED
DOC: PRD-TRUST-001 OWNER: J.D. KELLY  ·  REVIEWERS: REGULATORS, 30+ REGIONS
Trust, at scale
Problem
A healthcare platform imaging 100K+ members in three countries. Growth demands speed; medical data demands care. One bad call on data doesn't cost a sprint — it can end the company.
Users
Patients trusting us with the most personal data there is. Radiologists who need it to flow. Regulators across the Americas, Europe, UAE and APAC. And a business that has to keep moving.
Constraints
GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, PIPEDA, APA — all live at once. No slowing the roadmap. No spending trust to buy speed.
Shipped
A comprehensive privacy program and Responsible AI governance, designed as an enabler rather than a gate — privacy-by-design built into how the product gets made.
Outcome
Compliance across 30+ regions, achieved while the company scaled. The tradeoffs between growth, risk and patient trust got made in daylight, on purpose, every week.
Different backlog. Same job: understand the users, weigh the tradeoffs, ship. — JDK
THE LAB

Opinions about AI are cheap. So I build with it.

Nights-and-weekends projects with one rule: the problem has to be real. The best way to understand what AI changes about product work is to ship some of it yourself.

BUILDING

Alloy

An agentic product-management platform, built hands-on with Claude. Part product, part R&D: figuring out what PM work becomes when agents join the team — and what should stay stubbornly human.

BUILT WITH: CLAUDE
EXPERIMENTING

Varia

An experiment in dynamic assessments — a live testbed for building with AI against a genuinely hard, real-world problem. Small, sharp, and teaching me plenty.

STATUS: EARLY & FUN
THE TRAINING LOG

Player-coaches don't get an off-season.

Marshal a solution without understanding the problem and the people it lands on, and you'll be lucky or wrong. Neither is a strategy. So the reps never stop.

BASE:

MBA, Management of Technology — Simon Fraser University, 2020 · 4.1 GPA (earned while running product at Prenuvo)
Graduate Diploma, Business Administration · BA, Psychology (Minor: Kinesiology) — SFU

Privacy & Responsible AI

CIPP/E CIPP/C CIPP/US CIPM CIPT AIGP
six IAPP certifications — the whole privacy alphabet
  • Data Privacy & TechnologyHarvard Business School Online
  • AI Developer & AI Product Manager CertificatesIBM · Coursera

Security & Risk

  • Cybersecurity Strategy & Risk ManagementUniversity of British Columbia
  • Google Cybersecurity SpecializationGoogle · Coursera
  • Regulatory Compliance SpecializationUniversity of Pennsylvania · Coursera

Humans & Leadership

understanding people isn't a soft skill. it's the skill.
  • Psychological First Aidnew!Canadian Red Cross
  • Negotiation MasteryHarvard Business School Online
  • Foundations in Diversity & InclusionCCDI
  • Outsmarting Implicit BiasHarvard Business School Online
THE ROSTER

Teams I've played for.

this section is about them, not me — that's the point
format borrowed from Simon Sinek — start with why, always
Healthtech Visit Prenuvo (opens in a new tab)

Prenuvo

Vancouver-born · Clinics across North America
Why

Health problems should be found before they become health crises — proactive, not reactive.

How

Radiation-free, whole-body MRI in under an hour, paired with blood biomarkers and tracked year over year so change gets caught early.

What

Screening for hundreds of conditions across major organ systems — from Stage 1 tumours to silent killers like aneurysms — through clinics across North America.

Education Visit Simon Fraser University (opens in a new tab)

Simon Fraser University

Canada's engaged university · Est. 1965
Why

Knowledge shouldn't stay on campus — it should leave the mountain and improve lives.

How

Research, teaching and community engagement wired together across three campuses in B.C.'s three largest cities.

What

Canada's #1 comprehensive university in the Maclean's rankings for 17 of the last 18 years, home to nearly 40,000 students — including mid-career MBAs learning to run technology businesses.

HR & Payroll Visit Zenefits (opens in a new tab)

Zenefits

Now part of TriNet (acquired 2022)
Why

Small businesses should spend their energy on the business, not the back office.

How

HR, benefits and payroll unified in one platform purpose-built for small and mid-size companies.

What

A People Operations platform that served thousands of SMBs and helped define the category — living on today as TriNet's HR platform.

Hospitality Visit RoomKeyPMS (opens in a new tab)

RoomKeyPMS

25+ years serving independent hotels
Why

Independent hotels deserve the same edge as the big brands — without the big-brand price tag.

How

One affordable cloud property management system, backed by a support team made up of former hoteliers.

What

Reservations, front desk, payments and reporting in one place — powering 70,000+ guest rooms across the U.S. and Canada.

Fintech Visit Payfirma (opens in a new tab)

Payfirma

Now part of Merrco (acquired 2018)
Why

Getting paid should be the easiest part of running a business.

How

One platform for every sales channel — in-store, online and mobile — back before “multi-channel” was a buzzword.

What

A Vancouver payments pioneer and early mover in Canadian mobile payments, whose PayHQ platform was white-labeled by financial institutions — it lives on inside Merrco today.

Hospitality Tech Visit Vivonet (opens in a new tab)

Vivonet

Now part of Infor (acquired 2018)
Why

Restaurants and foodservice operators should run on insight, not gut feel.

How

Cloud-based point-of-sale, kiosks, kitchen systems and labour tools, processing millions of transactions every month.

What

Vancouver-built hospitality tech deployed in 4,000+ locations — from Sodexo cafeterias to quick-service chains — before joining Infor's global hospitality suite.

…and in service
Disaster Response Visit Team Rubicon Canada (opens in a new tab)

Team Rubicon Canada

Veteran-led · Est. 2016, Fort McMurray wildfires
Why

Their founding belief: no community should face disaster alone.

How

Redeploying the hard-won skills of military veterans and first responders — the Greyshirts — at no cost to the communities they serve.

What

4,200+ volunteers and 130+ operations across Canada and beyond — mucking out floods, sifting wildfire ash, showing up on someone's worst day and getting to work.

Service Visit Canadian Forces Primary Reserve — Army (opens in a new tab)

Canadian Forces Primary Reserve — Army

Part-time service · 100+ communities across Canada
Why

Canada needs surge capacity that lives where Canadians live.

How

Citizen-soldiers training one night a week and one weekend a month, alongside full civilian careers.

What

Trained soldiers who augment the Army at home and abroad — sandbagging floods and cutting firebreaks on Operation LENTUS when disaster hits. Where “leadership under pressure” stops being a metaphor.

THE CALL

Let's draw up the next play.

Looking for a product org that wants a leader who builds the team and ships alongside it. If that sounds like your huddle, my inbox is open.

Vancouver, BC  ·  Phone on request  (privacy guy — data minimization is a lifestyle)