About

I'm Clayton MacPhee, a Senior Program Lead at a fintech company in Toronto. I sit at the junction of Product, Engineering, and Support, where I design the frameworks the organization runs on — how work gets prioritized, scoped, planned, and handed off between teams.

I started in support because I genuinely loved solving people's problems. Three years on the front lines taught me the product from its failure modes outward — I wrote hundreds of engineering tickets, learned SQL to trace one-off complaints back to systemic defects, and kept drifting toward a bigger question: why does this keep happening, and what should we build instead? Eventually the role caught up with what I was already doing.

The moment product management clicked for me was during a major API upgrade with one of our aggregator partners. Watching the PM operate — carrying a single vision across half a dozen teams with competing priorities, and pulling them together around one problem — I realized that was the job I wanted: not just informing the call, but owning it. I've been deliberate about closing the gap since. I work alongside a Senior PM on roadmap scoping, PRDs, and sprint planning, sought out mentorship to sharpen the craft, and built a consumer app end-to-end so I'd own every decision a PM owns, from problem statement to App Store.

That app is Fork It, and it started at home: my partner has always found cooking daunting, and I wanted to build something that made the nightly "what's for dinner" decision easy for her. It's live on the App Store now, and the case study on this site documents the whole journey — what I predicted, what real usage showed, and what I changed because of it.

When I'm not working, I'm usually cooking (the app wasn't a coincidence) or training for triathlons. If you'd like to talk product, process, or what I'm building next, reach me at clayton.macphee@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.