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Mike Piechota — Turningideas intoworkingproducts.

I connect product thinking, design, engineering, and go-to-market execution — from the first question to something people can actually use.

Explore Pandough Explore Kompmodo

What it takes to build a product.

Every product people rely on is a stack of decisions. Most teams split that stack across five roles. Here is what sits inside it.

Layer 01

Understand the problem

Who is it for, and what do they really need?

Layer 02

Define the product

What should we build first, and what can wait?

Layer 03

Shape the experience

How should it look, feel and work?

Layer 04

Build the real thing

Does it actually work in real life?

Layer 05

Make it ready for people

Will people find it, trust it and choose it?

The whole stack

Five layers. One person who can hold all of them.

Not a replacement for a team — the connective tissue that keeps a product coherent from the first question to launch.

See it in real products

Selected work

Pandough's calculator: a Neapolitan dough planned for the chosen flour, with the hydration curve

Pandough

A dough planning product that starts from the flour you actually have. I shaped the concept, designed the experience and the brand, built the working product, and made the market-facing website.

Problem
Dough tools assume ideal flour. Real bakers don't have it.
Hard part
Planning logic with real functional depth, kept approachable.
Scope
Concept to working product and its marketing site.
Read the case study
ModoMatrix: a subject home and three comparable sales over the adjustment grid

Kompmodo

A pricing tool for listing agents. Asked to redesign one table, I designed and built the whole product, from map search to the shared report, then shipped it with the engineer who built v1.

Starting point
A brief to redesign one table, maybe as a clickable prototype.
Reframe
The whole pricing job: search, compare, market, report, share.
Scope
Product, UX, brand and build, then a handover to a pair.
Read the case study

Working at scale · MetaRouter · ~5 years

Five years inside a complex enterprise product.

Independent builds are half the story. At MetaRouter I worked within a product team on a complex enterprise platform — the kind of long-term product work where design systems, dense interfaces and collaboration matter more than any single screen.

Placeholder — an analytics dashboard (MetaRouter material pending permission review)

Visual pending permission review.

  • 01

    Team collaboration

    Working alongside engineering and product over many release cycles.

  • 02

    Design system

    Building and maintaining the shared language the product is made from.

  • 03

    Complex interfaces

    Making technical, data-heavy enterprise workflows usable.

  • 04

    Long-term ownership

    Living with decisions, and improving them, over years — not sprints.

How I work

Judgment first. Tools second.

  1. 01

    Start with the problem, not the screen

    I'd rather spend a day on the right question than a week on the wrong interface.

  2. 02

    Prototype in the real medium

    Code is a design tool. The fastest way to know if something works is to build it.

  3. 03

    Systems over one-offs

    Brand, components and tokens are product infrastructure — they keep everything coherent as it grows.

  4. 04

    AI as leverage, not a substitute

    AI tools speed up the build. Ownership, taste and decisions stay human.

Contact

Let's build the product you need.

I'm looking for a full-time product role at a small or mid-sized US team in technology or an adjacent field.

Schedule a meeting hi@mikepiechota.com LinkedIn Dribbble