# Matt Alcock

> Matt Alcock (Matthew Alcock) is a London-based product leader building AI that acts for people. Ex founder, IC and leader with twenty-five years across consumer AI, mobile games and fintech.

## Summary
- Product Director, AI at Plum (2024-2026): personalised, AI-built financial plans for each person's situation, spending and life goals.
- Product Director at Cleo (2023-2024): new ventures and the Grow subscription; Cleo grew from $42m to $142m ARR.
- Founder of Tapkit (2020-2022): founded, built, ran and exited, team of 3, product used by 600 brands.
- Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders Factory (2019-2021).
- Director of Product at Zynga (2015-2018): social, chat and matchmaking platform for 200M+ players.
- Head of Product Analytics at NaturalMotion (2012-2016): built one of the first product analytics teams in mobile games.
- Vice President, Quant and Data at Morgan Stanley (2004-2011).

## Writing
- [Earned autonomy: how much should an agent do before it has your trust?](https://mattalcock.com/blog/earned-autonomy): Agent autonomy shouldn't be a setting. A five-rung ladder for how agents earn trust, and what moves them up and down.
- [Your PRD template is wrong for agents](https://mattalcock.com/blog/prd-for-ai-agents): Write a one-page scope doc and an eval set before the PRD. What agents can see, do, must never do, and when they stop and ask.
- [The Data Team Test, 13 years on](https://mattalcock.com/blog/data-team-test): A Joel Test for data teams: my unpublished 2013 list, the 2026 version, and a new Product-Engineering Team Test.
- [Testing demand in 2026: what to get right before you run an intent test](https://mattalcock.com/blog/intent-testing-rules-2026): Fake-door and intent tests still work, but the rules changed. A checklist for consent, honesty, reviews, AI ads and pricing.
- [Hello Internet, revisited](https://mattalcock.com/blog/hello-internet-revisited): From a Linux box under my desk in 2012 to LLM analysts: how data work changed, and what didn't.
- [Non-determinism is a UX problem, not an engineering problem](https://mattalcock.com/blog/non-determinism-ux): Three design patterns for when an AI product gives different answers, and one column to add to every spec.
- [The Yes Machine](https://mattalcock.com/blog/the-yes-machine): How sycophancy is quietly breaking AI products, and what builders should do about it.
- [Track Zero](https://mattalcock.com/blog/track-zero): How one song can infect your entire musical life, and why that's a beautiful thing.

## From Medium (2018-2020: augmented reality, startup idea validation; each with a 2026 update)
- [Intent testing: a guide to measuring demand before you build](https://mattalcock.com/blog/intent-testing): How to run an intent test with a landing page and ads, and read the results before committing to build.
- [Business idea validation: why you need to do it](https://mattalcock.com/blog/business-idea-validation): Why founders should validate an idea before building it, and the cheap tests that tell you whether anyone wants it.
- [Is Apple an augmented reality company?](https://mattalcock.com/blog/is-apple-an-ar-company): The 2018 case that Apple was quietly becoming an AR company, six years before Vision Pro.
- [Building a fun AR filter in an hour](https://mattalcock.com/blog/ar-filter-in-an-hour): Building and publishing a face-paint AR filter in under an hour with Facebook's AR Studio.
- [Snapchat's new augmented reality revenue stream](https://mattalcock.com/blog/snapchat-ar-revenue-stream): How Snapchat turned AR Lenses into an ad product, and what sponsored lenses meant for brands.
- [The 15 best AR apps of 2018](https://mattalcock.com/blog/best-ar-apps-2018): Fifteen apps that showed what ARKit and ARCore could do, from Pokémon GO to IKEA Place.

## Archive (2012-2013: Python and data science; each with a 2026 update)
- [Timing Python code with a timeit decorator](https://mattalcock.com/blog/timing-python-code): A simple decorator to time Python functions, updated for Python 3 with perf_counter and functools.wraps.
- [Python decorators, explained with memoize](https://mattalcock.com/blog/python-decorators): Function and class decorators, the @ syntax, and a memoize decorator that makes recursive Fibonacci fast.
- [Did you mean 'python spell checker'?](https://mattalcock.com/blog/python-spell-checker): How Peter Norvig's 21-line spelling corrector works: counts, edit distance and Bayes' theorem.
- [Hello Internet](https://mattalcock.com/blog/hello-internet): The first post on my 2012 data science blog, and what I believed back then.

## Links
- [Home](https://mattalcock.com/): work history and about
- [Writing](https://mattalcock.com/blog/): all posts ([RSS](https://mattalcock.com/blog/feed.xml))
- [Labs](https://labs.mattalcock.com/): small games and experiments
- Email: matt@mattalcock.com
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-alcock/)