Product leadership, strategy, and technical build

New businesses, built.

Throughline Works is a senior product operator with a bench of specialists. We take an opportunity that has no playbook yet, make the case for it, design the product, and ship it. Done inside a Fortune 20 company and as a founder.

For leadership teams

Fractional product, GM, and strategy leadership for a new product, market, or business line.

Fractional services → For owners and small teams

Automations that take repetitive work off your plate, like publishing, follow-ups, and data entry.

Automation and build →

Selected work

GolferJourneys

2025 to present · golferjourneys.com

A national golf trip planning site covering the major US golf destinations, with rated destination guides, in-depth course profiles, and a trip finder that matches a group to the right place. Built and run by a two-person team.

As co-founder, Eric drives product, editorial standards, monetization, and local partnerships. The lesson that carries to other businesses: a small team can run a national-scale catalog if the data model and the operations are designed for it. AI sits in the product operations layer, handling data enrichment, quality checks, and publishing steps, so the people spend their time on judgment, partnerships, and the parts customers notice. Revenue comes from routing qualified trips to local planners, with partnerships live in two markets.

AstroStructured dataAI in operationsPartner revenue model

Selected work

Blog and Instagram automation

2026 · For GolferJourneys · Make.com + Claude

A multi-step, prompt-driven workflow that turns a topic brief into a published article and a scheduled Instagram post. It is calibrated so routine pieces need little manual input, and a person still reviews the steps that call for judgment.

Make.com runs the sequence across Airtable, Claude, the Astro site, Cloudflare image storage, and Instagram. One prompt drafts from the site's structured data, a second checks the draft against house rules and published facts, and the post goes out only after it passes validation.

Challenges we optimized for include:

Record preservation
Duplicate post prevention
Eliminating hallucinated content
Instagram image sizing

The same pattern works for any business that publishes on a regular schedule, whether that is a newsletter, product updates, a local guide, or a weekly post.

Make.comClaude APIStructured outputIdempotent writesCloudflare R2Instagram Graph API

GolferJourneys blog index with travel articles produced through the publishing workflow

Selected work

DIYwithHelp

2022 to 2025 · Purpose Built, Inc. · diywithhelp.com

An online marketplace connecting DIY homeowners with experienced tradespeople for real-time video consultations. Concept to working MVP with full P&L ownership.

Designed and launched using AI-assisted development, low-code platforms, and an international freelance network. Validated demand for remote trade expertise, then made a deliberate wind-down decision when LLM-based advice began reshaping the category's economics.

Low-codeAI-assisted buildMarketplaceCustomer research

Where the experience comes from

Scale, inside companies people know.

AT&T Digital

Led concept-through-build on a retail media business and a co-branded credit card program. Ran a 70-plus person eCommerce organization across digital properties reaching 30M monthly users. Hand-picked by the officer team to define mobile wallet strategy.

OpenX

Identified, built, and launched a new product line in a B2B adtech platform. Reached roughly 1% of company revenue within six months of launch, a $15M gross run rate.

Yahoo!

Strategic planner for entertainment properties reaching about 30M monthly users. Translated audience data into product and content direction.

Deloitte

Selected for the National Office strategy and innovation team. Built analytical frameworks for strategic planning and operational assessment across the firm.

For leadership teams

Upstream of the backlog.

We figure out what to build, why it matters, and how to prove it works. When a build is needed, we build it, and we hand over something a team can run without us.

Fractional Head of Product

Seed to Series B · new product or new category

Sustained product leadership through a zero-to-one build cycle, covering business model, revenue design, and go-to-market as well as roadmap and execution.

Fractional GM / Growth Lead

Business unit, product line, or new market entry

A general manager for a product line that needs an owner: P&L, growth, team, and cross-functional coordination while the founding team focuses elsewhere.

Strategy & Innovation Advisory

Mid-market and enterprise · boards and investors

Standing advisory on opportunity identification, business case development, and new category definition. A structured outside view, on a schedule.

Formats

Fractional leadership on a monthly retainer, project scopes with a defined deliverable, or standing advisory at lower frequency. Terms are set to fit the engagement.

Where we fit best

Content and publishing, marketplaces, travel and hospitality, digital media, retail media, and consumer commerce. Founder-led companies where the buyer is in the room.

For owners and small teams

Less of your week on work a system could do.

We design and build automations that connect AI to the tools you already use, like spreadsheets, your website, and your social accounts. Every project is scoped up front with a fixed price.

Posting every week eats your Saturday

Content drafted, checked against your standards, and scheduled for you.

Leads land in a spreadsheet and sit there

Follow-ups and handoffs that go out on their own.

Something breaks and nobody notices

Duplicate posts, missing records, and silent failures, found and fixed.

Pipeline build

Fixed scope

A content or data workflow built end to end, from intake to publish, with checks at the steps that matter.

Audit and hardening

Fixed scope

A review of an automation you already run. We find duplicates, dropped records, and silent failures, and we fix them.

AI cost review

Fixed scope

Which models you use, how often, and what that costs, with changes to caching, batching, and model choice.

Maintenance and monitoring

Monthly plan

Someone watching your automations, so a broken step gets caught before your customers see it.

About

One principal. A bench you only pay for when you need it.

Eric Salsa

Principal · Product, strategy, go-to-market

Founder and operator who builds new customer-facing products and businesses from scratch. Six years at AT&T Digital rising to Director of Product Development, earlier roles at OpenX, Yahoo, yellowpages.com, and Deloitte. Co-founder of GolferJourneys. Top-decile leadership ratings from direct reports. MBA, Harvard Business School.

The bench

Engineering · Automation · Design · Content

A small group of specialists we have worked with on our own products. They are brought in by scope rather than kept on payroll. The engineering side has a computer science background and built the automation pipeline behind GolferJourneys. Eric scopes the work, manages delivery, and is accountable for the result.

Contact

Start with thirty minutes.

Bring the opportunity you are weighing, or the thing that is not shipping. We will tell you what we would do with it and whether we are the right people to do it.

eric@throughlineworks.com

Eric on LinkedIn Santa Monica, California. Working with teams across the US.