Product & Program Leader · Perth, WA

Simeon
Alva.

Product & Program Leader AI Explorer MBA (Technology) ACSPO LSS

I make complex, multi-team programs successful — and build the teams and governance that keep them moving.

Let's talk
Perth, Western Australia
Simeon Alva — Product Leader
About Sim

Shaping digital products
and the programs that deliver them

I'm a product and program leader with over 10 years of experience delivering complex, multi-team programs across Fintech, HealthTech, Government, and Gaming. My roles have often been Product, but have almost always had a heavy leadership and program delivery focus. My career spans enterprise banking systems at Bankwest, hyper-growth marketplace execution at Healthengine, and digital product strategy as Director of Customer Experience at Lotterywest — and today I work across two of VGW's most complex programs, spanning every brand and platform.

I'm drawn to work where the stakes are real — where user experience, commercial performance, and technical delivery all have to move together. I build the strategies, operating rhythms, governance and team cultures that make that possible, consistently and at pace. Leaders need one straight answer on where things really stand, so they know where they can help.

I hold an MBA in Technology from UNSW AGSM (Distinction with Excellence), am an Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner, and am actively exploring the AI space — experimenting with agentic workflows and new product paradigms. I lead ProductTank Perth, the local chapter of the world's largest product management community.

Complex programs, delivered Working across cross-brand programs and platform modernisation that transformed performance at scale — with the governance and visibility that let leaders act early.
AI across the lifecycle Using AI across the whole delivery lifecycle to work faster and better — hands-on with agentic workflows, AI-assisted discovery, and the reporting that keeps programs visible.
Team builder and coach Building product functions, shaping ways of working, and coaching Product Owners toward outcomes-focused delivery — across banking, health, and gaming.
Regulated industry experience Across banking, healthcare, and lottery — navigating regulatory environments without sacrificing user experience or delivery pace.
Expertise

Where I do my best work

Broad enough to lead at director level. Deep enough to still hold the backlog.

Product Strategy & Growth

North Star metrics, OKR frameworks, product-led growth mechanics, monetisation strategy, and B2B/B2C discovery. I connect roadmap decisions to commercial outcomes, not just user stories.

PLG OKRs Monetisation Dual-sided marketplaces

Program Delivery & Team Coaching

Working across concurrent, cross-functional programs and shaping governance that fits the teams and the work, so decisions get made quickly and delivery moves faster rather than slower. One source of truth teams maintain themselves, risks and dependencies surfaced early, and coaching for the people running the work so the standard holds beyond the programs I touch.

Program Governance Risk & Dependencies Delivery Coaching Ways of Working

Regulated Industry Delivery

A decade across banking, healthcare, and lottery means I know how to ship confidently in regulated environments — keeping product velocity high while meeting the obligations that matter.

Financial Services HealthTech Gaming & Wagering Government Digital

AI & Emerging Technology

Using AI across the entire project lifecycle — discovery, specification, planning, status and reporting — to improve efficiency and effectiveness. I think there is far more headroom here for delivery and program work than most teams have taken up: less time assembling the picture, more time on the decisions only people can make.

Agentic Workflows AI Tooling Automation Thinking Continuous Learning

Stakeholder Management & Executive Communication

Translating between technical squads, commercial stakeholders, and executive leadership simultaneously. I build the communication rhythms that create clarity up and down the organisation — without slowing delivery.

Roadmap Alignment Executive Reporting Cross-Functional Leadership Stakeholder Mapping
Career highlights

A track record built across
four industries

From enterprise banking to hyper-growth health marketplaces to government digital transformation to regulated lottery.

VGW (Virtual Gaming World)
Senior Product Manager
Mar 2026 – Present

Working across two of the business's most complex cross-brand programs — spanning multiple product teams, platform functions, and an external delivery partner.

  • Program delivery: Took on a major cross-brand program and saw it land with the outcome the business needed — enabling internal teams across all brands and platforms to do their best work.
  • Governance and executive visibility: Established planning and governance built to suit the teams and the nature of the work, so decisions were made quickly and delivery moved faster, and kept deliberately light — reporting regularly to senior leadership and framing trade-offs in commercial terms.
  • Advisory and coaching: Supported a top-priority growth program largely from the background — coaching the people accountable across subject matter, governance, process and leadership, surfacing risks, and driving commercial outcomes.
Independent R&D — In parallel
AI & Agentic Product R&D
Founder / Builder — Independent
2026 – Present

Exploring what product practice looks like when AI tools are genuinely embedded in the workflow — hands-on experimentation with agentic workflows, AI-assisted discovery, and product automation.

  • Agentic workflows: Experimenting with autonomous agents that assist discovery and specification — mapping problem spaces, generating user personas, and drafting early requirements.
  • AI-assisted design: Exploring how AI tooling can accelerate the path from validated concept to prototype, bridging the gap between product requirements and design output.
Lotterywest
Director of Customer Experience
Aug 2023 – Feb 2026

Shaped and led the product, design and agility function for Western Australia's state lottery, owning the roadmap across the entire digital portfolio — responsible for commercial digital performance, platform direction, and team capability across product, design, and delivery.

  • Platform replatforming: Led the UX and platform replatforming to React / AWS, which unlocked a significant step-change in digital channel performance and release capability.
  • Delivery pace: The replatforming enabled a move from infrequent legacy release cycles to two high-quality production releases per week.
  • Product capability: Shaped the Product Management, Design, and Agile disciplines — establishing the practices and rhythms that support a modern, discovery-led product function.
  • PO coaching: Directly coached Senior Product Owners, shifting squad focus from feature output to data-driven discovery and outcomes-focused delivery.
Healthengine
VP of Product / Senior Product Owner
2022 – 2023

Led the digital portfolio across the core business: both the healthcare marketplace and the B2B GP SaaS platform, serving consumers booking healthcare appointments and the clinics and GP practices managing those bookings. Navigated rapid scale, strategic pivots, and an experimentation-led optimisation programme.

  • B2B SaaS pivot: Led the strategic shift to prioritise the GP SaaS platform, conducting deep discovery through clinic stakeholder interviews to align platform architecture with clinical workflows.
  • Hyper-growth execution: Orchestrated an 8x scale-up of platform services in four months to handle unprecedented pandemic-driven user demand without service degradation.
  • Experimentation culture: Instituted a RICE-based prioritisation framework and multivariate testing engine, delivering a meaningful collective revenue uplift by optimising search-to-booking funnels.
  • Search re-architecture: Re-engineered search ranking logic based on deep-dive user research, reversing revenue declines and stabilising platform economics.
Bankwest
Product Lead / Senior Product Owner / Senior Risk Manager
2014 – 2022

Eight years across product leadership and risk management in one of Australia's largest regional banks. Led complex cross-functional squads to automate enterprise-scale product delivery and risk systems, and built the product craft across the organisation.

  • Product Guild leadership: Led the Bankwest Product Guild, building a community of practice across the bank's product function — focused on agile execution, backlog mastery, and modern product craft.
  • Pricing automation: Led the transition from a manual 48-hour mailbox approval process to an instant-approval automated pricing engine — a significant competitive advantage for the broker channel.
  • Core system remediation: Served as Product Lead on a major core system modernisation project, deploying OCR technology and advanced rules engines to automate the verification of 10,000+ contracts.
  • Backlog strategy: Led a major repricng initiative, managing backlog negotiations between Commercial, Risk, and Engineering teams to deliver a significant revenue benefit.
Community leadership

Lead Organiser,
ProductTank Perth

ProductTank is the world's largest product management community, with chapters in cities across the globe. As Lead Organiser for the Perth chapter, I curate events, facilitate knowledge-sharing sessions, and connect product practitioners across Western Australia — from first-time POs to senior product leaders. Building community is product work: you're shipping culture, not code.

Education & Credentials

Formal foundations,
practical edge

Master of Business Administration (Technology)
UNSW AGSM — Australia's leading business school
Distinction with Excellence
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner
Red Agile — ACSPO Certification
Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt
SA Partners — Process Efficiency Specialist
In progress
AWS AI Practitioner · Reforge Growth Series
Let's talk

Open to the right
conversation

Whether you're building a product team, scaling a digital platform, or navigating a regulated environment that needs a product thinker who can hold both the strategy and the backlog — I'd genuinely enjoy the conversation.

simeon.alva@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/simeon-alva
Perth, Western Australia

Drop me a line and I'll get back to you promptly. I'm always happy to chat about product strategy, team building, or interesting problems.

Send me an email