About Matthew Stublefield
I'm a product management consultant with 20+ years of experience helping companies answer the questions they can't afford to get wrong. I run Fieldway, and the practice is built around one thing – The Fieldway System: a reproducible way to answer a hard question with rigor, keep that answer current as the world moves, and turn it into a direction you can act on.
I work with two kinds of people. Founders and product leaders making a high-stakes direction bet – and, increasingly, solo builders who can ship with AI but need a real read on what to build. And boutique advisors and independent consultants who need senior research and synthesis handled behind the scenes, so they can stay the face of their own client work.
What I Do
Everything runs through one system, in three stages:
Fieldway Research answers a hard question once – the full corpus, a synthesized read, and a recorded walkthrough of what I found and what I'd do about it.
Managed Intelligence keeps that answer current as the world moves – behind the scenes for advisors (on their clients' documents), or out front for teams and solo builders validating what to build next.
Product Strategy turns the evidence into a validated direction a team can build against – behavioral personas, a problem inventory, a prioritized roadmap, and a clear read on what not to build. When the bottleneck turns out to be execution rather than direction, the engagement can continue into the build.
Research is the front door; the other two are research plus a layer.
Track Record
Stride – Led the turnaround of an 80-person product team that was five months behind schedule with an 80% defect rate. Within 90 days the team tripled productivity, cycle time dropped from 4–6 weeks to 5–7 days, and they shipped their first major release.
Tallo – A 10-year-old career platform with plateauing growth, stuck on how to reach a new audience. I delivered a researched direction the team could build against; they were shipping a month later, and it's grown into an ongoing engagement.
CoinDesk – Increased engineering throughput nearly 3x while cutting the defect rate by 15%. Separately, redesigned the cryptocurrency price-page strategy, driving significant search-traffic gains.
Adaptavist – Conceived the market strategy for Learn for Jira from customer research and gap analysis. Led a turnaround of an underperforming product line. Built a documentation strategy that moved ScriptRunner's docs from the #1 uninstall reason to a top-5 retention driver.
Big Four consulting – Led delivery-improvement programs across multiple business units at one of the Big Four firms, coaching teams through the shift from waterfall to iterative delivery.
How I Got Here
I've spent my career at the intersection of product, engineering, and strategy. I started on the IT help desk at Missouri State University, moved into project management, and found my way to product management through leadership positions at media and technology companies. Eventually I realized the most valuable thing I do is figure out what's actually going on – what's broken and why, or what's worth building and what isn't – before anyone rushes to a fix.
That instinct – diagnose before you prescribe – came from a pattern I kept seeing. Smart, capable teams stuck on a problem they couldn't see from the inside, or a direction they couldn't converge on. Leaders who'd tried new frameworks, new hires, and consultants, with nothing working. The answers were almost always there in the evidence – invisible to insiders, and findable through the right mix of research, observation, and listening.
I've done this across technology, media, education, healthcare, and financial services. The industries change but the patterns repeat. Teams that confuse motion with progress. Organizations that treat symptoms instead of root causes. Leaders who need someone outside the system to see what they can't.
Twenty years of pattern recognition across dozens of engagements is what makes the work reliable. I've seen most of these problems before – not exactly, but close enough that I know where to look and what the evidence means.
Outside of Work
I live in Springfield, Missouri, with my three young sons and wife of more than 18 years. When I'm not thinking deeply about interesting questions, I'm probably reading, hiking, or trying to keep up with whatever my kids are into this week.
Let's Connect
Email matthew@fieldway.org to schedule a call or ask how the Fieldway System could help with the question you're sitting on.