Ben Dalziel
Technical product leader. I build products people use, and the platforms underneath them.
San Marcos, California
I joined a small software studio as employee four and came in as an engineer. Great engineers are only as good as the requirements they’re handed, so I built the product function, then design. What you end up with isn’t a set of people, it’s an engine. It is about thirty people now, and the difficult part was never the growth, it was doing it with no map and no peers to ask.
Most of my work sits where product judgment and technical depth benefit from being held by the same person. I use AI heavily and daily, and it keeps widening how much ground that one person can cover.
Most of that work has been in sports and live events, where the date never moves and the entire audience arrives at once. That is a product constraint before it is a technical one: it decides what ships, what gets cut, and in what order, long before anyone sees the result.
Experience
- 2017 – present
- Chief Product Officer, Slytrunk · Remote
- 2025 – present
- Product Lead, New Ventures, Trash Panda · Remote · concurrent
- 2011 – 2016
- Software Engineer, iOS Architecture Lead, Slytrunk · Hybrid
- 2008 – 2011
- Senior Software Engineer, Yahoo! Sports · Sunnyvale, California
- 2005
- Software Engineer Intern, IBM · Hursley, England
Williams F1 Team’s corporate website became a global fan platform, and the registered audience went from zero to more than 1.5 million. The same capability later ran for the U.S. SailGP Team, a different sport in a different venue, and standing it up took configuration and creative work rather than new engineering. The rest of the record lives on LinkedIn.
Education
- MS
- Computer Science, San Francisco State University
- BSc
- Mathematics & Computer Science, Durham University
Elsewhere
Liverpool FC, yoga, comic books, and psychology, the last of which feeds the day job more than it should. Live music, logged setlist by setlist, and the vinyl that follows it home. Birdwatching, logged the same way. Three kids, who set the schedule everything else fits around. I volunteer at a food bank in Vista. I mostly drink decaf coffee, which people can have big feelings about.
Tech stack
VPN
NordVPN
Passwords
1Password
Socks
Gold Toe
Browser
Brave
Family
Bark
Snack
Boom Chicka Pop
AI
Claude
Editors
Emacs Sublime Text
Database
TablePlus
Design
Figma
Music
Apple Music
Beatle
Paul