Surfers don't fight the ocean — they study it, then commit. Same method here. I'm Amanda Gall: surf enthusiast, product strategist, experience designer. Fifteen years making other people's products work, now shaping five of my own.
Fifteen years at the intersection of product, brand, and UX — VP of Product at Ackroo, Product Director at Paystone, an industrial design degree from OCAD underneath it all. I treat product the way cold-water surfers treat the ocean: respect the conditions, do the homework, then paddle out and commit. Because people don't experience strategy decks — they experience products. I build for the second thing.
An emotional wellness product with no app to download — on purpose. Tell it how you're feeling and how you want to feel; it builds you a curated real-world itinerary and delivers it one text message at a time. Designed, branded, and built end to end. Live, with paying customers.
A companion through life's unmarked transitions — the ones culture forgot to design ceremonies for. Three letters. Two witnesses. One year between sending and return. In the shaping bay.
Led product for a loyalty and payments platform assembled through acquisition — which meant taking a portfolio of products that grew up apart and making them behave like one. Strategy, roadmap, and the unglamorous work of making complex systems feel simple to the merchants who relied on them.
Directed product across payments and customer loyalty tools for small businesses — the kind of software where a confusing screen costs someone real money before lunch. Where I learned that in fintech, trust isn't a brand value. It's a feature.
Most wellness products ask you to open another app and stare at another screen. Self Check-In does the opposite: it sends you back out into the world. You describe your emotional state and the one you want instead; it responds with a real itinerary — places, timing, small instructions — arriving progressively by SMS, like a thoughtful friend who plans well.
Reply NEXT when you're done and ready for your next stop. — Self Check-In
NEXT
Tuesday 11:37amStop 2 of 4 — This one is a surprise.
Head to King West Books — 905 King St W. Walk in and take your time browsing.
Someone picked a book for you — ask the person at the counter for the Self
Check-In pick. You don't have to know anything about it before you open it.
If you find something else that catches your eye, that's allowed too.
This is your time.
Settle up at the counter when you're ready — the book is yours to keep.
"Generalist" used to feel like a confession. It turned out to be the whole point.
I've run an upholstery practice, managed small businesses, staged real estate, led marketing, and directed product teams. Every one of those jobs taught the same lesson from a different angle: the thing people pay for is never the strategy — it's the experience the strategy produces. My OCAD training in industrial design is where that instinct started. The career since is where it got tested.
In late 2024 my partner and I left Hamilton, Ontario for Oyen, Alberta — population roughly a thousand, horizon roughly infinite. The prairie does a convincing impression of the open ocean, and the nearest actual break is eleven hundred kilometres west — which makes me either Alberta's most landlocked surfer or proof that surf is a mindset. We bought a hundred-year-old house that is itself an ongoing product roadmap. Distance from the noise is very good for judgment.
This chapter is deliberate. I'm building five original products before the year is out — not to fill a gap, but because after fifteen years of improving other people's products, I wanted to find out what mine look like. What's next is senior product leadership somewhere ambitious, or collaboration that needs both strategy and taste. I'm building either way.
For the dry-land version, with dates and bullet points —
Download CV (PDF)