Curriculum vitae
Vincent van der Laan
AI product strategist · Amsterdam, NL
Twenty years of design and creative direction behind it.
Profile
I work on AI systems that make things, text, images and page layouts, and stay inside what a brand actually allows.
Most of that work is not the generating. It is figuring out what "allowed" means precisely enough that a machine can be held to it, and building the layer underneath that it draws from. Agents and conversational interfaces are only as good as that layer, so that is where I spend my time.
I came up through design and creative direction, and moved into product strategy at Foleon in 2023. For the past year I have spent most of my time building working prototypes rather than writing specifications for them.
I test what I build. When a test says the idea does not work, I publish that too.
Core areas
- Agentic strategy and architecture
- Where an agent can be trusted to act, what it needs underneath to act well, and how the work is divided between the agent and the person reviewing it. Evaluator loops, grounding, human-in-the-loop by design rather than by exception.
- Substrate: taxonomy and system of record
- The knowledge and asset layer people and machines both draw from. Taxonomies, automated tagging, one system of record, drift detection and retirement.
- Governed generation
- Text, images and layout. Working out what a brand allows precisely enough that a machine can be checked against it.
- Conversational interfaces
- Content that answers rather than gets read. Grounding, pilot loops, and finding out why a bot says something its source does not.
- Enterprise content platform
- Editors, grids, templates, styling kits, asset management. What has to exist before a generated page looks like someone made it.
- Measurement, and tests that can fail
- Building things that tell you where an output actually landed, kept separate from whether it is any good. Designing experiments that could show the idea is wrong, and saying so when they do.
- Product strategy
- Turning architecture into positioning, roadmaps and shape pitches other people can act on.
Where I'm most useful
Bring me in first
- AI product strategy and vision
- A roadmap or leadership conversation needs a clear AI direction — and its trade-offs — put into words.
- Content architecture and domain modelling for AI
- Ontologies, taxonomies, brand-to-model translation, constrained retrieval, variance governance — anything about making AI output land on brand reliably.
- Agentic systems and orchestration
- Designing agent workflows: evaluator loops, tool integrations, grounding and hallucination diagnosis, guardrails, human-in-the-loop.
- Layout systems, grids and editor architecture
- Grid and layout foundations, editor UX decisions, template and creation strategy.
- Brand governance and design systems
- "What does on-brand mean for AI?" Brand kits, template frameworks, identity versus manifestation — and turning brand rules into something a machine can execute.
- UX and editorial design
- High-stakes visual or editorial judgement, wireframing, prototyping, accessibility-aware flows.
Also strong
- Product shaping and discovery
- A pitch or solution direction needs writing or a critical review; scoping appetite against value.
- Conversational content and new formats
- Pilots, feedback synthesis and grounding issues in conversational formats.
- Strategic storytelling
- A strategy has to land — with leadership, a whole company, customers or an academic audience.
- SEO and AI discoverability
- Is this content crawlable, citable and ready for answer engines — and how do you check?
Not the right person for
- Deep backend implementation. I diagnose and specify; engineers implement.
- Commercial negotiation and pricing. I inform packaging; I don't own the deal.
- Production claims for the prototypes. They are prototypes on purpose — the measurement is real, deployment is not.
In the room Energy and well-placed humour — useful when a session needs lifting or a sceptical room needs disarming.
Experience
Product Strategist
Foleon · 2023 — present
- Three domain prototypes
- Working systems for text, images and layout. Each one is told what is allowed for a given purpose, measures what it actually produced, and keeps every human approval as something to learn from. They are prototypes on purpose. I wanted to know whether the architecture holds before anyone commits product time to it.
- Measurement programme
- I checked whether the measuring layer gives the same answer twice, and whether telling the system what you want actually changes what comes out. The first honest answer was no, and I published that before I had a fix. The cause turned out to be plumbing. On some dimensions the problem was my measurement rather than the generating. I had been about to blame the model.
- Agents in daily use
- An answer agent for internal product questions that pulls its sources through Slack and Atlassian, cites them, and says so when it finds nothing. A use-case matrix for trust agents across Support, Legal, Product and Professional Services. A set of skills that turn brand rules into executable specs, so decks and documents come out on-brand the first time.
- Conversational content
- Owner of the conversational format from first pitch to closed beta: a published document that answers a prospect's questions from its own content. Pilot feedback loops with internal and external users. One "hallucination" traced with the team to a markdown-extraction bug in the content pipeline, not to the model.
- Substrate and asset architecture
- Product vision and prototypes for the layer people and machines both work from. Several hundred curated knowledge units, with someone reviewing every promotion, plus drift detection and retirement. Alongside it, asset management with taxonomies, tag groups, automated tagging and a system of record.
- Platform foundations
- Before the generative work, and still underneath it. Creation UX pitched at the level our users actually work at. A new layout system built on a 24-unit grid, decided with the CTO and scoped for the new editor from alpha to open beta. Navigation strategies shipped as templates, template strategies, styling kits, animation and transitions. Underneath all of it: which ingredients have to be controlled centrally so the output stays coherent.
- Vision and roadmap
- Foleon's AI vision, iterated through a dozen versions for the leadership team and the whole company. A business case for a governed content operating system. The G-CORE framework for governed generation, compressed for an academic audience at VU Amsterdam.
- Working method
- A way of keeping several parallel AI sessions aligned by having them write to each other through files in a shared folder, instead of sharing one large context. Conceptual work and implementation work stay apart without drifting.
Creative Director
Foleon · 2021 — 2023
Creative strategy and storytelling for the platform and the brand. Product narrative, content formats, and brand expression for digital publishing. Built the Brand Kit and UX Kit as the platform's reusable building blocks, and helped position Foleon around interactive content experiences.
Lead Digital Designer
Foleon · 2018 — 2021
Product design and experience direction. UX and UI for interactive content creation, visual systems for digital documents, platform templates, and the platform design language.
Art Director & Designer
DutchGiraffe Digital Creatives, The Hague · 2013 — 2018
Interactive online magazines and annual reports for clients including ANWB, VGZ and the University of Amsterdam. Concept, design, art direction, illustration and project management. Closely involved in building WP-Magazines, a CMS for responsive magazines, and set up several magazines on it end to end. Trained clients' editorial teams, gave masterclasses and wrote whitepapers on the format. The craft Foleon later productised.
Designer & Art Director
VormVijf ontwerpteam, The Hague · 2008 — 2013
Concept, design, art direction, DTP, project management, illustration and photography. Books, annual reports, magazines and websites.
Designer
Zabriski Ontwerpers, Leiden · 2001 — 2008
Concept, design, art direction, DTP, illustration and photography. Ten years of print before moving to digital.
Published writing
An ongoing series on how you govern AI that makes things. Mostly about the line between what you can write down and what stays a human call, and it includes the measurements that went against me. Concepts are published; implementation is not. Read the essays →
Awards
- Best Mobile App — winnerDigital Communications Awards, Berlin — for Eline Spreekt2017
- Platform of the Year and Cover of the Year — nominatedDigital Magazine Awards, London2016
- Grand Prix Bedrijfsbladen — winnerFor VROM Tellus2007
Education
- Graphic and typographic designRoyal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)2001 — 2006
- Graphic designMediacollege Amsterdam1997 — 2001
Languages
- Dutch (native)
- English (fluent)