LEADERSHIP / PORTFOLIO
Christopher Baker
AI Transformation & Product Leader
Founder, Unified Technologies LLC • Fort Lauderdale, Florida
I turn ambiguous business problems into working AI products and systems—and take ownership from discovery through deployment and adoption.
THE THROUGH-LINE
End-to-end
responsibility.
My work starts with understanding how things actually happen: the people, decisions, disconnected systems, and manual work behind the problem. I combine product judgment, hands-on technical delivery, and commercial experience to decide what should change, build or guide the solution, and improve it in use.
Across 28+ years in technology and business systems, including 13+ years as a founder/operator, the consistent thread is end-to-end responsibility—not just a recommendation, prototype, or handoff.
01 / BUILT & OPERATED
AI Products I Have
Built and Operated
Two different product problems, with the same responsibility: connect the user need, product decisions, AI behavior, integrations, and production operations into a usable experience.
The problem: Authors need a consistent social presence, but producing images, copy, links, and scheduled posts can become a second job. I built StoryFlow to turn that recurring work into a structured, reviewable publishing workflow.
- Owned the product end to end: concept, workflow design, positioning, pricing, customer-facing implementation, onboarding, subscriptions, infrastructure, launch, and ongoing operations.
- Connected the entire workflow: Amazon author/book ingestion, structured context, strategy-driven copy and image generation, review and approval states, queues, and Facebook/Instagram publishing through n8n, APIs, OAuth, and webhooks.
- Built for production: validation, error handling, human-review gates, monitoring, backup/recovery, and regression testing, with customer friction and operational feedback informing improvements.
A product decision: When users requested direct LLM prompting, I investigated the underlying need and identified persistent brand context as the more scalable requirement for consistent, customer-specific generation.
Configured operating workflow: six drafts daily, a controlled two-post queue, and two approved posts per day. The product includes the controls and lifecycle around generation—not just the model call.
The product: A guided, tarot-inspired AI subscription experience combining conversation, speech input, narration, generated imagery, and downloadable PDF readings. I owned the interaction design, AI orchestration, implementation, and recent backend modernization.
- Orchestrated multiple capabilities: conversational workflows, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, image generation, and PDF outputs through Flask and asynchronous Celery/Redis processing.
- Protected session state: per-reading isolation, stale-request and result checks, state-reset safeguards, and rate-limit handling to keep asynchronous outputs aligned with the correct reading.
- Modernized and released deliberately: migrated AI workflows to the OpenAI Responses API and used Git-based change review, isolated development/production services, validation checkpoints, targeted deployments, backups, and rollback procedures.
A product-engineering decision: I moved image preparation into background tasks with caching and reuse, while separating backend readiness from frontend presentation. That allowed preparation to proceed asynchronously without disrupting the intended narration and image transitions.
What to look for in the demo: how conversation, narration, imagery, and the final document come together in a guided experience. The creative context makes the interaction visible; the underlying work is orchestration, state management, reliability, and product design.
02 / TRACK RECORD
A Track Record of Turning
Friction into Systems
AI is the newest part of a longer pattern: identify high-friction work, redesign the process, connect the right systems, and stay accountable for the result.
24–48 hours to approximately 30 minutes. I led the redesign and automation of accounting and affiliate-payout workflows, replacing a labor-intensive process with a repeatable system.
I hired and managed the IT team, worked directly with executives, marketing, operations, and end users, and balanced new development with operational continuity. Delivery included dynamic multi-site .NET e-commerce, Exigo CRM, API integrations, customer-specific offers, and campaign automation.
The through-line: responsibility for the business process and its implementation, not just the technology request.
I supported EAS.com and Bodyforlife.com at 3 million daily users across the properties, with responsibility spanning application development, databases, production incidents, and cross-functional delivery.
The bottleneck: content teams depended on technical staff for routine publishing. I independently built a custom CMS that enabled writers to manage reusable content and dynamically update major site sections, reducing developer dependence and improving content relevance and searchability.
The broader work included SQL Server operations, development/staging/production environments, an Oracle E-Business Suite migration, SSO, and cross-site integrations. I remained through the Abbott transition and supported cross-company integration work.
Built and operated Amazon advertising automation serving hundreds of customers and managing up to 5,000 ads per customer. I also led discovery, sales, and solution conversations and delivered client websites, integrations, automation, launches, and ongoing technical guidance.
Adoption through understanding: I led weekly learning and critique groups for 14 years, supported thousands of writers internationally, and created structured learning resources. Across my teaching and enablement work, I have created 60+ video lessons alongside workshops, coaching, and reusable guidance.
This experience informs how I work with users and stakeholders: listen closely, explain tradeoffs, make feedback actionable, and help people become independently capable.
03 / OWNERSHIP & DELIVERY
How I Take Ownership
- 01
Understand the Real Problem
Work with users and stakeholders to uncover the actual workflow, decisions, constraints, exceptions, and manual handoffs. Treat a feature request as evidence to investigate, not automatically as the right specification.
- 02
Decide What Should Change
Translate ambiguity into scope, workflow states, dependencies, acceptance criteria, and failure handling. Weigh customer value, technical risk, and delivery constraints to decide what to build, simplify, defer, or stop.
- 03
Deliver and Improve in Use
Build or guide implementation, review and test changes, deploy with appropriate controls, and support adoption. Use customer feedback, production behavior, and business signals to improve the system and create reusable practices.
AI-assisted delivery, with human accountability: I define goals and constraints, direct coding-agent work, inspect changes, test behavior, diagnose failures, and revise or reject generated output. Git review, validation checkpoints, targeted deployment, and rollback support the delivery process; responsibility stays with me.
04 / TECHNICAL DEPTH
Technical Depth That
Supports the Work
AI and Automation
OpenAI Responses API, image and speech APIs, Claude, Gemini, Codex in VS Code, n8n, Apify, structured context, agentic workflows, validation, and human-review controls.
Applications and Integrations
REST APIs, OAuth, webhooks, SQL/T-SQL, JavaScript, PHP, Python scripting, Flask, WordPress/WooCommerce, Celery/Redis, queues, subscriptions, and CRM integrations.
Production Delivery and Reliability
Git, VS Code Remote SSH, Docker, Linux, Nginx, Gunicorn, systemd, isolated dev/prod services, deployment validation, rollback, logging, monitoring, Katalon, backups, Cloudflare, and pfSense.
Product, Commercial Work and Adoption
Discovery, requirements, prioritization, prototypes and POCs, customer demonstrations, positioning, pricing, onboarding, analytics, executive communication, workshops, and reusable playbooks.
Communication is part of delivery. I also publish as Christopher Hawke (opens in a new tab), author of The Craft of Writing. More than two decades of workshops, coaching, and facilitation inform how I explain complex systems and help people put them to use.
LET’S MAKE THE NEXT STEP USEFUL.
Let’s Turn a Difficult Problem
into a Working System
I am focused on AI transformation, applied-AI product leadership, forward-deployed product management, and deployment strategy. My strongest fit is a team that needs someone to make sense of a messy problem, connect business and technology, and own the path to a usable solution.
Based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Open to conversations about roles that combine meaningful ownership, customer understanding, practical AI delivery, and adoption.
Christopher Baker
Founder, Unified Technologies LLC
Fort Lauderdale, Florida