Product & Transformation Leader · AI-native builder · Houston
For 17 years I've led products and the operations behind them: a portfolio of 800+ digital products at the University of Melbourne, a zero-to-one launch in the Cosmos ecosystem, and a UX agency whose profit I helped grow from 9% to 36%. Through all of it I've built things myself, from automating Verizon's reporting in 2011 to the systems I build with AI today.
In 2025 my mom passed away, and my family's mobile diagnostics company needed someone to step in. I stepped away from product leadership to run it, and it became a full turnaround. Fifteen years of designing products and teams around other people's businesses had prepared me for it. Good work transfers: from the company's first KPIs and management cadence to about 30 systems I designed and built myself.
Now I'm looking for a senior product role leaning into transformation and operations, and I take on fractional work through my practice, Actional.
Find the real problem, build what fixes it, and leave a team that runs it. Five chapters, from a Verizon analytics desk to my family's company.
Digital Analytics Lead to Digital Associate Director
Proved: data, and building my own tools
General Manager, UX agency
Proved: running a business
Head of Digital Product Management
Proved: product at scale
COO & Head of Product; Product Lead, Hydro
Proved: zero to one
Managing Director & Head of Growth, family company
Proved: the whole business
Product strategy, UX and major site rebuilds, and go-to-market, in-house and through agencies.
Lopez Negrete2011 - 2015
Yump2016 - 2021
University of Melbourne2021 - 2022
LOA Labs · Informal Systems2022 - 2025
Along the way I was part of teams recognized with an ARF David Ogilvy Award (Gold, Multicultural), a Victorian Premier's Design Award and 4 Gold ADDYs.
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I install operational AI infrastructure for founder-led service businesses with $3M to $25M in revenue: systems that connect their tools, enforce their workflows, and surface financial truth faster.
Family-founded mobile diagnostics company (X-ray, ultrasound, EKG, labs) serving 180+ facilities and 10,000+ patients a year across Greater Houston. Chief executive and sole technical resource. We doubled the team and moved into a new Sugar Land office and fleet warehouse.
The core engineering and product organization behind the Cosmos Hub, a top-20 public blockchain: hundreds of developers across 15+ teams in three independent organizations.
Web3 venture studio focused on climate and social impact.
One of the world's largest digital presences: 800+ products and 1.2M assets at a $2.5B institution.
Specialist UX agency for high-stakes transformations: the World Health Organization, the State Government of Victoria, Dementia Australia.
The largest independent multicultural agency in the US. Promoted three times.
BBA in Entrepreneurship and Finance, magna cum laude, University of Houston. Founded True*Tech Solutions, a small-business technology and process consultancy, then led interactive strategy at two Houston agencies.
Most operational problems are design problems nobody has looked at from the user's side.
I spend time with the people doing the work and the people it serves, then agree on what success means for them and for the business. Hundreds of discovery workshops taught me the brief is rarely the problem.
First I go wide: what would this look like if the systems talked to each other, if the check ran itself, if the report wrote itself? Then I narrow it to a scoped plan with a known cost, clear outcomes, and the unknowns named up front.
I build it with a team, or roll up my sleeves and build it myself with AI when the situation calls for it. Either way, I prove it in numbers Finance can verify. Then I take the team along: explain the why, pace the change to what they can absorb, and put owners, SOPs and a scorecard around it.
On most teams I've been part of, I'm the bridge. The founder or designer brings the big idea, the engineers see how hard it sounds, and I find the version that's worth building and map the path to it.
At my family's company, each one started as an operations problem someone was living with. With no engineering team to lead, I scoped, designed and built each one with an agentic team.
Shared with the owners' permission. Patient, staff, client and vendor details are withheld.
The billing team stopped retyping claims. About $160K a month of insurance, Medicare and Medicaid claims now move from the imaging system into AdvancedMD through its API, checked line by line, from a review page I designed for them.
Revenue cycle · AdvancedMD API · EDIRead the case study →Direct billing closes itself: about $40K a month at $0 variance. Its test suite caught a defect that would have silently dropped 91 billable visits in a single month.
Billing · Square API · 1,300+ regression testsRead the case study →Found money nobody knew was missing: a $169K backlog of unposted payments and about $50K payers had underpaid. Built in one afternoon from 539 explanation-of-benefits reports, with nothing lost across 1,291 claims.
Revenue recovery · parsing pipeline · penny-level reconciliationRead the case study →Leadership runs the business from one place: budget vs. actual, denials, nightly order-to-cash reconciliation and live dispatch. Used every day to make decisions.
Leadership · Cloudflare · QuickBooks · Square · PlaidRead the case study →Every incoming lab order can now be audited automatically: 8,928 order emails read with zero extraction errors.
Compliance · Gmail API · OCR · LLM extractionRead the case study →Seven years of Medicare-required patient images saved before access to the old platform ended: 241,000 imaging files, 835 GB, 99.991% complete and checksum-verified.
Data · DICOM imaging files · checksum verificationRead the case study →The leadership dashboard I built for X-Ray Mobile Texas. Select any screen to see it full size.
Staff names, order locations and customer names are blurred.
I run an agentic team, governed by shared memory and versioned operating rules. Every system starts with a spec, ships with tests that check business outcomes rather than just working code, passes deployment gates with rollback, and gets a human review before it goes live. HIPAA is designed into the engineering: PHI-minimized data, role-based access at the API layer, and credential guards on every repo.
For most of my career I've led people, not just systems. The builds above I did with an agentic team because the company had no engineering team to lead. What I want next is both: leading people who work this way, with the same specs, tests and reviews. With the right operating rules, four people building like this can do the work of fifty.
The questions recruiters and hiring managers ask most, answered in a sentence or two.
Brian Truax is a product and transformation leader in Houston with 17 years leading products and the operations behind them, across global agencies, higher education, blockchain infrastructure and healthcare. He finds the real problem, imagines what technology makes possible, narrows it to a scoped plan, then builds it, with a team or hands-on with AI, and brings people with it.
Yes. He's looking for a senior product role leaning into transformation and operations, Senior Manager to Director, remote or hybrid in Houston. The best way to reach him is a message on LinkedIn.
Lead a team. He has led about 45 people on the Verizon Wireless account and 10 product managers at the University of Melbourne. He built the systems at his family's company with an agentic team because there was no engineering team, and he wants to lead people who work the same way.
Agencies (Verizon Wireless at Lopez Negrete; the World Health Organization and the State Government of Victoria at Yump), higher education (800+ digital products at the University of Melbourne), blockchain infrastructure (Informal Systems and the Cosmos Hub) and healthcare (a full turnaround of his family's mobile diagnostics company).
Yes, through his practice, Actional, for founder-led service businesses with $3M to $25M in revenue whose systems don't talk to each other. More at actional.us.
Houston, Texas. He works remote or hybrid in the Houston area.
Senior product roles leaning into transformation and operations, Senior Manager to Director, remote or hybrid in Houston. Introductions to hiring managers are always welcome.
Message me on LinkedInFor founder-led service businesses whose systems don't talk to each other and whose numbers arrive too late. I work through my practice, Actional.
Visit actional.us →