Todd Blocksom · Product leader, AI platforms · Seattle

Good AI makes the person using it harder to replace.

I’ve spent twenty-five years building it: Dragon Drive, Siri in the car, and Google Cloud’s analytics surface. Now I build agents, full time.

Abstract painting: heavy black horizontal brushstrokes over a hidden red mark, with paint running down from their lower edges.
Untitled · Todd Blocksom, acrylic on canvas
A band of night sky, deep indigo shading down into luminous blue.
Todd Blocksom, oil on canvas

Work

  1. 2022 to now
    47north Technologies
    Founder and principal consultant

    An independent product consultancy and R&D lab. Everything below sits under it.

    • HIDE/SEEK 2026 to now

      Designed, built, and shipped a location-based multiplayer iOS game solo, from product spec to public beta, in 41 active build days.

    • Totem Grid 2025 to now

      Principal PM for an offline-first mesh platform. A 100-user Burning Man deployment converted into a Burning Man org partnership and a FIFA partnership supporting World Cup 2026 staff operations.

    • Apple, Commerce and Payments 2023 to 2024

      Contract program manager. Scoped EU Digital Markets Act impact for the analytics organization and drove GDPR-aligned anonymization work.

  2. 2018 to 2022
    Google
    Senior TPM, Cloud Data Analytics

    Sole TPM for a 65-person organization across a dozen analytics products. Earned adoption for a shared component library with no authority to mandate it, cutting front-end effort 80%, and ran the VPAT certification that unblocked $2B+ in public-sector contracts.

  3. 2016 to 2018
    Apple
    Senior engineering program manager, Siri

    Turned Legal’s delete-everything stance into approved, PII-scrubbed training retention, growing usable data 4×. Took Do Not Disturb While Driving from a Craig Federighi directive to shipped in one summer, and am co-inventor on the resulting patent.

  4. 2013 to 2016
    Nuance
    Principal PM, Automotive

    Owned the roadmap for Dragon Drive, the conversational AI platform behind BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen voice systems. It runs in more than 200 million vehicles today and powers MBUX.

  5. 2001 to 2013
    Earlier

    RealNetworks, where I pitched and led a six-designer UX studio. Tweddle Group, on Toyota Entune and Chrysler Uconnect. Loudeye, on the O2 Germany music store. Microsoft Office, where I hold a patent on the Persona Menu and built an event-condition-action automation prototype that looks a lot like agent tool calling, twenty years early.

A band of crimson brushwork sweeping diagonally into grey.
Todd Blocksom, oil on canvas

HIDE/SEEK

A location-based multiplayer game that turns a neighborhood into a game board. I built all of it: the product spec, the game economy, the design system, the SwiftUI client, a server-authoritative Postgres and PostGIS backend, a web spectator view, and the release pipeline. It is in public TestFlight beta, with the App Store submission in review.

Read the case study myneighborhoodgames.com

Point of view

For twenty-five years, I worked on the human end of hard systems: voice in cars that had to work at seventy miles an hour; Siri, where privacy and quality pulled in opposite directions; and a Google Cloud analytics surface shaped by a dozen teams with competing ideas of what it should be.

The pattern was always the same. The technology itself was rarely what stood between someone and the outcome they wanted. The gap was in what the system assumed about them, what it made them prove, and how much work it handed back.

That is the distinction behind the headline. The interesting question is not how much of someone’s job an AI product can do. It is whether the person using it can do things they could not do before.

I spent this past year testing that question firsthand. It changed how I build.

Contact

If you’re hiring for an ambitious AI product and need someone who understands both the technology and the people using it, I’d like to hear about it.

Write to todd@47northtech.com, find me on LinkedIn, or download my resume.