Heather Gawel

At Aurora Solar I owned product and design across 8 teams for a $70M+ business with four product lines, three of them acquired. I revamped the strategy for a $20M line so it captured 80% of projected revenue with 40% of the investment. And I set up a valuation framework in six weeks that killed a low-return project and moved $1M somewhere better.

At Loopio I ran a portfolio of 8 teams and 4 product managers across AI acceleration, integrations, add-ons and a newly acquired product line. We shipped the company's first two add-on revenue products in under three quarters.

At Axonify the C-suite picked me to lead the integration after the Nudge acquisition. We shipped V1 on time and on budget.

At Magnet Forensics I took IGNITE, the company's first cloud-native product, from discovery to commercialization and $12M in revenue projections with a team of four.

This is the part I care about most. Six product managers I've coached have earned promotions: four at Axonify through an upskilling program I built, two at Aurora within six months.

I've led design too. At Aurora I led the head of design and a team of four designers, folded user research into the design team, and set the quality bar for product and UX across the portfolio.

The valuation framework at Aurora is the thing I get asked about most. Before it, sequencing calls took weeks and came down to whoever argued hardest. After, they took days and came down to numbers.

At Axonify I overhauled the PM tooling and how we valued work. It started with the innovation team and ended up across all seven product teams, and it doubled our speed to decision: the company's first backlogs prioritized on impact versus effort instead of opinion.

I build the same things for clients now. Prioritization frameworks, planning cadences, and the AI that takes the manual work out of them, so customer interviews, support tickets, sales calls and usage data land in a weekly digest and an exec brief instead of on someone's Sunday night.

I've trained more than 200 product professionals on using AI across discovery, research, prototyping and delivery, at a 4.9 out of 5 average rating, with people coming from over 150 organizations.

I run my own practice in Claude and Claude Code, and I support client teams on Codex, Google's suite and Copilot. What I leave behind is reusable: prompts and templates, scoring rubrics, decision frameworks, custom Claude skills that teams keep running after I'm gone. Every team's stack is different and the tooling shifts weekly, so I keep a standing read on it and turn that into things teams can actually act on.

The prototyping habit is older than the AI, though. I was championing design sprints and rapid prototyping across the portfolio at Magnet back in 2019.

I lead PM Waterloo, a not-for-profit product community of several hundred members in Kitchener-Waterloo. We ran our first annual conference, Built to Flex, this year. I also coach youth baseball in KW.

• MBA, Strategic Management and Marketing
  Wilfrid Laurier University (Lazaridis School) · 2012
• MASc, Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering
  University of Waterloo · 2009
• BASc, Mechanical Engineering and Biomechanics
  University of Waterloo · 2006