High standards and high humanity
The high bar and the deep care, held together; and why the best teams need both.
Rafe Blandford
Product, technology and AI — systems thinking, out loud.
I work at the intersection of product, technology and AI — and the cross-disciplinary orchestration that turns them into outcomes. Most recently that meant Chief Technology & Product Officer at Digitas UK (Publicis Groupe), leading a 200-person product and technology capability and decade-long digital transformation partnerships for some of the world's biggest brands. Here I write about how this is changing the way we think, work and lead — and about the curiosities I collect along the way.
Selected work: Formula 1 · Honda · EE · Glastonbury — more work →
Curated writing
A few pieces worth starting with.
Loops within loops
AI doesn’t just accelerate product development; it changes the economics of feedback loops.
Living on the agentic frontier
Point capable agents at your own data for long enough and you find out which bits of the hype are real.
Work
Short case studies of programmes, projects and initiatives I've led or worked on — the outcomes, and my role in them.
AI & the future of work
What AI actually changes for products, teams and how we work.
A front door for people and machines
Two audiences now: the bifurcation the web and how this site looks to address this.
Lessons in AI Adoption
The UK Government's AI Adoption Plan for the creative industries: eight strong recommendations, an eye-catching stat, and what to take from them.
Notes from SXSW London 2026
Notes from SXSW London 2026: redesign before technology, the reinvention window, and a greater-than-usual ambiguity around the AI hot-topics.
Product, technology & transformation
The leadership view — shaping strategy, leading change, and orchestrating product, technology and the people who deliver it.
Agentic product development, up close
What building RafeOS with AI taught me about compression, discipline and judgement.
An e-ink screen on the wall with TRMNL X
How I'm using a 10.3-inch e-ink panel from TRMNL to show a daily briefing, smart home, health info and more.
Developer experience with TRMNL
Five e-ink screens built in one day. What made it quick was a platform built to be legible to agents.
RafeOS
A personal operating system and second brain — home, health and working life — built to explore systems thinking, the agentic edge and custom agentic harnesses.
AI-powered briefings
The layer that sits above all the modules and tells me which of them I should care about.
The Cockpit
An introduction to Cockpit, the personal app that is the face of RafeOS.
What is RafeOS?
An introduction to RafeOS: the parts, what they look like, and how they fit together.
All About Archive
Preserving 20 years of mobile history — and what it took, documented in public.
Bringing back the forum — 449,000 posts
The All About Symbian forum — 449,000 posts from 39,000 members, 2001–2013 — restored as a static archive after a decade offline.
Preserving All About Symbian
All About Symbian was the go-to destination for Nokia and Symbian coverage. How — and why — I preserved it as a permanent static archive.
Archiving 20 years of mobile history
Three sites, 24,000+ articles documenting the rise and fall of entire mobile ecosystems — migrated from a dying server into a permanent static archive.
All About — the archive
Twenty years of mobile history, preserved — the All About network, rebuilt as a permanent, fast, searchable archive.
