Chuck Reynolds

Product engineer, from the codebase to go-to-market. Twenty-six years of building for the web, end to end.

Hi, I'm Chuck. I work with founders, engineering leads, marketing, and go-to-market teams who want a senior set of eyes on their product end to end: how it's built, how the team ships it, how real people use it, and how it gets found. Then I make it better, whether that means modernizing what's there or rebuilding it from the ground up.

Building a product and getting it adopted are usually separate skills, often on separate teams. I've spent my career doing both.

Where I'm useful

• The whole system, including the user's side of it. Architecture, data flow, release process, and the person on the other side of the screen. Years of building sites, stores, CRMs, and backend systems taught me where people trip up. Most people work one side of that line. I work both: I see where users get stuck, and I can build the fix.
• Building it better. Modernize, streamline, or rebuild: one source of truth, automation for the repetitive work, and processes the team will actually follow. Built right the first time, with security and privacy designed in from the start.
• Getting it found and adopted. Positioning, websites, technical SEO, analytics, conversion, and marketing automation. A product only matters if the right people find it, understand it, and stick around.
• Bringing AI into how a team works. Agentic workflows, shared knowledge bases, reusable skills, and the guardrails that let a whole team adopt them with confidence.

How I work

I use AI agents every day, the same way I use any good tool. I write the spec, I review every change before it ships, and I still write code by hand when that's the better path. Writing a good spec for an agent is the same job as writing a good PRD or ERD for a development team, which I've been doing for years.

Background

My titles have mostly said product, SEO, or partner, but I've been building the whole time. Web architecture and custom web apps through Rynoweb and Vuurr, for clients like GitHub and Twilio. Predictive modeling at Levers. Technical SEO alongside the engineering teams at CBS Interactive and Red Ventures, across CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot, and more. At Wikimedia Enterprise I came in as the product marketer and stayed as the builder. I launched the marketing site, API docs, and brand voice, then rebuilt all of it: a modern site and docs made for AI agents as well as people, plus the internal tooling and automation the team runs on.

• Levers: 2nd place at Hollywood Hackathon 2013 applying our models to IMDB box-office prediction. Retired.
• TWIMLbin: acquired by Twilio.
• Betwext: the first SMS marketing platform built on Twilio. Sold, and still running.
• Organized the first two WordCamp Phoenix conferences (2009, 2011). Helped init and grow Gangplank a collaborative coworking space. Pitched in helping and/or organizing AZ Entrepreneurship Conference, PodCampAZ, Ignite Phoenix, and other local tech events (tweetups! early days were fun).
• BS, Computer Information Technology, Arizona State University (2000).

Two decades of how information gets structured, ranked, retrieved, and served. That turns out to be the same problem AI is solving now.

What I'm building

• Wikimedia Enterprise: my day job, as Staff Product Manager, Growth. Bulk data, retrieval, and grounding APIs for Wikipedia and sibling projects. Free tier exists; go play.
• Open source odds and ends: social image size references, helpers for running Claude more safely, and whatever else I needed badly enough to build.
• Vuurr: Partner since 2011. Digital intelligence firm: custom web apps, technical audits, complex campaigns. Past and current clients include GitHub, ASU, MIT Sloan, Supercell, Twilio, Parse (Meta), Cox, Keap, Mattermark.
• OrbitHull: modular cargo containers for orbital tasking. (Yes, really.)
• Rynoweb: web tech consultancy I've been running since 2000.

Talk to me

Open to fractional and project work alongside my current role.

email: hello@chuckreynolds.com