Writing with AI, in my own voice
Explaining how I write with AI and the creation of voice and deslop skills.
Rafe Blandford
Product, technology and AI — systems thinking, out loud.
I work at the intersection of product, technology and AI — and the cross-disciplinary orchestration that turns them into outcomes. Most recently that meant Chief Technology & Product Officer at Digitas UK (Publicis Groupe), leading a 200-person product and technology capability and decade-long digital transformation partnerships for some of the world's biggest brands. Here I write about how this is changing the way we think, work and lead — and about the curiosities I collect along the way.
Selected work: Formula 1 · Honda · EE · Glastonbury — more work →
Curated writing
A few pieces worth starting with.
Treat your operating model as a product
Your operating model is a product. Treating it as one lets you move faster and makes people happier.
High standards and high humanity
The high bar and the deep care, held together; and why the best teams need both.
Work
Short case studies of programmes, projects and initiatives I've led or worked on — the outcomes, and my role in them.
AI & the future of work
What AI actually changes for products, teams and how we work.
Why does AI feel so different in 2026?
Why 2026 feels like a tipping point to some and gradual change to others, explained with three benchmarks and two stories from the coalface.
Living on the agentic frontier
Point capable agents at your own data for long enough and you find out which bits of the hype are real.
A front door for people and machines
Two audiences now: the bifurcation the web and how this site looks to address this.
Product, technology & transformation
The leadership view — shaping strategy, leading change, and orchestrating product, technology and the people who deliver it.
Making product ideas visible before they look finished
I built an agent skill to shorten the loop between talking, visualising and revising, while keeping product judgement where it belongs.
Loops within loops
AI doesn’t just accelerate product development; it changes the economics of feedback loops.
Agentic product development, up close
What building RafeOS with AI taught me about compression, discipline and judgement.
RafeOS
A personal operating system and second brain — home, health and working life — built to explore systems thinking, the agentic edge and custom agentic harnesses.
AI-powered briefings
The layer that sits above all the modules and tells me which of them I should care about.
The Cockpit
An introduction to Cockpit, the personal app that is the face of RafeOS.
What is RafeOS?
An introduction to RafeOS: the parts, what they look like, and how they fit together.
All About Archive
Preserving 20 years of mobile history — and what it took, documented in public.
Bringing back the forum — 449,000 posts
The All About Symbian forum — 449,000 posts from 39,000 members, 2001–2013 — restored as a static archive after a decade offline.
Preserving All About Symbian
All About Symbian was the go-to destination for Nokia and Symbian coverage. How — and why — I preserved it as a permanent static archive.
Archiving 20 years of mobile history
Three sites, 24,000+ articles documenting the rise and fall of entire mobile ecosystems — migrated from a dying server into a permanent static archive.
All About — the archive
Twenty years of mobile history, preserved — the All About network, rebuilt as a permanent, fast, searchable archive.
