She is not a fractional COO. She is not an Agile coach. She is not the project manager you were going to hire. She installs the operating layer underneath all of those roles — the layer most scaling product companies do not yet know is missing.
Somewhere between fifteen people and eighty, the part of running your company that worked on instinct stopped working. The standups still happen. The dashboards still update. Engineering still ships. But you've started double-checking.
You ask the same question in three different forums to triangulate the answer. You read the weekly summary and feel the gap between what it says and what you suspect is true. You don't say this out loud — because you can't prove it, and because the team is good and the team is trying. But you know.
More effort does not fix this. More AI does not fix this. What you need is not a coach. It is an instrument.
Across Under Armour, ESPN, Paradigm, Happy Health, Nike, and other high-growth product environments, Harlie has spent 15 years building the systems that connect strategy, product, engineering, delivery, and leadership visibility. Edge Collective exists to install that layer before speed turns into chaos.
I install an authored operating instrument that turns shipping into something the founder can actually trust. Not a faster team. Not a tidier JIRA. The end of guessing whether the company is moving as fast as the report says it is.
The instrument first. The roadmap second. The handover always.
The instinct to bring in senior help is right. The shape of that help is what most founders get wrong.
Runs operations across the whole company — finance, people, GTM — at the executive layer. A generalist who can read the product org but cannot author it.
Teaches ceremonies and facilitates retrospectives. The work lives in the standup — not in the operating layer underneath it.
Manages timelines and tickets inside an existing system. Harlie designs the system the project manager will eventually run — and in many engagements she is the person who hires that PM into the role she is exiting.
AI accelerates whatever is underneath it. If what's underneath is unreliable, AI accelerates the unreliability. Harlie installs the foundation that lets AI become a multiplier instead of an amplifier.
She is the operator a CEO calls when growth has made the company too big to read by feel and too small to have built the instruments yet. She installs the layer underneath all of those roles — the layer most companies at this stage do not yet know is missing.
15+ years embedded in product and engineering organizations — from billion-dollar consumer platforms to multi-team product orgs at scale.
Under Armour, ESPN, Nike — delivery work on consumer-facing platforms used by millions, where a missed milestone had real consequences
Paradigm / Builders FirstSource, Happy Health — enterprise and high-growth startup environments where cross-functional delivery broke down as teams scaled
Every framework in The System was tested in a live environment before it became standard — nothing was designed in a workshop
The same pattern across all of them: visibility fails before execution does — and no one names it until a founder stops trusting their own numbers
Want to see it in practice?
Case studies are available on request. I review every submission and send the most relevant examples — no auto-send.
Request Case Studies →You know what's going to land — and what's at risk.
Teams are aligned on what actually matters.
You're not chasing updates or second-guessing timelines.
You can make decisions confidently — because the information is real.
Typically 20–80 people, post-product-market-fit, often post-Series A — at the point where growth has outpaced their ability to see the company clearly.
Founders who have stopped trusting the numbers in front of them and need an instrument, not a coach.
When I'm not working, I'm usually snowboarding or chasing my dachshund Doug around.
I like simple systems, direct conversations, and work that actually means something.