AI product strategy
Deciding which AI initiatives deserve investment, which to kill, and what happens when the system is wrong. Governance treated as a product problem, not a compliance one.
Introduction
Short version
Bhavna Sharma is an AI product leader and independent consultant based in Toronto. She spent a decade building products inside organizations. First retail analytics, then enterprise platform work: system migrations run under live load, multi-phase platform consolidations, multilingual content delivery, and data products used across retail, healthcare, pharmacy and food service. She closed that chapter leading a product management team.
In mid-2025 she went independent. She now does two things at once. She helps organizations adopt AI in a way that survives past the demo: training teams, setting up development practice, and deciding what is actually worth building. And she builds herself, hands-on, because judgment about this technology decays quickly if you are not shipping with it.
Her clients are mostly not technology companies. That is deliberate: the most interesting questions about AI are being asked in rooms where nobody has a machine learning team.
Services
How she works with organizations
Team enablement & training
Getting real people genuinely fluent, not tool demos. Workflow design, practice, and the habits that make adoption stick after the enthusiasm fades.
Agentic workflow design
Provider-agnostic agent systems and harnesses, so capability is not hostage to a single vendor's roadmap or pricing.
Prototyping & MVP delivery
Hands-on building to prove a thesis fast, with the discipline to ship the smallest useful version and hold the rest back.
Product craft coaching
Specs, discovery and acceptance criteria for probabilistic systems, where behaviour drifts and failure has to be designed rather than avoided.
Speaking & facilitation
Panels, masterclasses and internal sessions on how the product role is changing, and what stays constant when everything else moves.
Position
What she argues, and why
01
Nobody has figured this out
Not the labs, not the engineers running agents overnight. If you feel behind, you are on time. Start anywhere, one percent at a time.
02
The core remains core
Customers are still customers. There are just more kinds of them now, including the agents. What moved is where judgment lives, and how much of it one person carries.
03
Cheap to build is not a permission slip
Engineering estimates used to do prioritization for us. That constraint is gone, so restraint has become the craft itself.
04
Multiplication, not competition
Anyone who hoards what they know is capped at what one person can learn. Rooms that share compound.
Selected work
Hearth myhearthapp.ca ↗
A directory for practitioners in Toronto's conscious community: osteopaths, massage therapists and bodyworkers. Built so they could be found. Designed, built, database wired, tested and shipped solo in one week. Practitioners from the community ran the testing themselves: a move worth defending in that context, and worth refusing on anything holding sensitive data.
Build ledger
v1 · one week · solo
- Practitioner registrationShipped
- Public directory & modality searchShipped
- Phase two, designedHeld back
- Phase three, designedHeld back
- Phase four, designedHeld back
- Phase five, designedHeld back
The week is not the achievement. Four phases were fully designed, entirely buildable, and deliberately left out. That decision is the credential.
Also building
Ongoing practice
A working clone of her own thinking
Sharded across the projects she runs, and rebuilt continuously, because the person it models keeps changing.
Parallel agent workflows
Multiple coding agents running concurrently across live client work, with the orchestration and review discipline that requires.
Voices
What the people she has worked with say
Collected from colleagues and leaders across technology, design, PMO and executive teams.
You helped me see the worth of my authentic self and get over imposter syndrome. You've updated my definitions of empathy, resolve, courage, integrity and soul. I would happily report to you.Senior Director, Product Management & UX
Racing against the clock on that long deployment night… your "get it done" spirit was contagious. From day one you embodied the belief that even a 25th hour can be created if you need it.Director, Technical Support
She is a great friend and mentor, and an even greater team member. She coached me in dealing with executives.Senior Director, PMO
I admire how she stays calm and composed, even in the middle of a storm. She focuses on getting to the root of the problem and working toward a solution.Information Systems Supervisor
An early adopter of agile and ahead of the curve on our crawl-walk-run approach. Extraordinarily cool under pressure when things weren't always working out.Senior Project Manager, PMO
She brought calm, clarity and care to our cross-functional sessions, leading product development across key projects.Director, Business Solutions (Digital Commerce)
Record
Where she has been
- Since 2025
Independent Consultant
AI product and development-lifecycle enablement · training and sustainability
- 2024-2025
Senior Manager, Product Management
GS1 Canada · platform consolidation programme, product team leadership
- 2021-2024
Product Manager, Products
GS1 Canada · platform migrations, content and data products across retail, healthcare, pharmacy and food service
- 2020-2021
Product Manager
Askuity, a retail analytics subsidiary of The Home Depot
- 2019-2020
Project Coordinator
The Home Depot Canada
- 2015-2017
Network Engineer
Infosys · Pune, India
Background
Education & recognition
Nominee, Rising Star in Tech, Women in Tech Toronto. Winner of the Golden Gong Award, the Rock Star Award and the Han Solo Resilience Award at GS1 Canada, for platform delivery and for holding steady under pressure.
Post-graduate certificate in Computer Software and Database Development, Lambton College. Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Kurukshetra University.
Sectors worked in
- Agriculture
- Mortgage brokerage
- Investment advisory
- Manufacturing
- Financial services
- Retail
- Healthcare & pharmacy
- Food service
- E-commerce