A clear product direction your team can deliver.
I help founders and product teams set priorities, understand their customers and ship. Work with me part-time, or for a focused engagement when you need a clear next step.
I bring senior product experience, technical depth and hands-on AI prototyping.
Product leadership from first question to next release.
I bring strategy, customer discovery and technical depth to one role. I help teams choose what matters and ship with a clear definition of success.
I build AI products and work across engineering and business teams.
Track record
The last five years
I have been in product for more than 7 years. Here are the last five.
Roots
I grew up in the suburbs of Naples and Milan, where the priority was paying the bills. A “stable job” was the wildest goal. Dreaming felt expensive. Leaving that reality seemed unthinkable.
Early career
I studied Physics, started in a technical role and moved into business within a year. I had no formal business education. I learned through customer conversations and decisions I had to take responsibility for.
5 years ago
- Positioned an already-built product in an unfamiliar market.
4 years ago
- Expanded the product's software capabilities.
- Coordinated a government project in the nuclear sector.
- Started coaching colleagues on product thinking.
3 years ago
- Founded yourwAI, helping people find their way through career choices.
- Joined Sympower to manage energy products.
2 years ago
- Promoted to Senior Product Manager.
- Grew yourwAI to 1,000+ active users.
- Funded my own AI studies.
- Started building a product or experiment every month, like Devdok.
1 year ago
- Started coaching PM colleagues on AI practices.
- Co-founded Binderly to assess the environmental impact of construction materials.
- Built DataMask to anonymise text before sharing it with AI tools.
Recently
Built four products:
- Quantum Motionfitness coaching
- ADESAI agent design
- GoJobhospitality hiring
- Mamma Caloriesmeal planning
- Helped AirShield's founder shape the proposition, brand and fundraising case.
- Helped train and evaluate OpenAI and Anthropic models as a product expert.
Today
Building Zero2Hero, my product management consultancy for founders and companies.
I would gladly recommend Mario to any product organization looking for a thoughtful, pragmatic, and impact-oriented Product Manager.
Mario is someone who doesn't just talk strategy, but actually helps shape it in a practical way. I'd happily work with him again anytime.
Where I help
When product decisions need attention
Everything is a priority
The roadmap keeps changing and nobody can say what deserves time.
The founder coordinates everything
Decisions, customer questions and follow-ups all land on one person.
Customers try it and leave
You need to see where people struggle and which changes are worth testing.
AI ideas outpace the plan
Find a useful workflow, test it and decide what is ready for real users.
Services
Four ways to work together
Ongoing leadership, a strategy engagement, focused consulting or team coaching.
- 01Preferred engagement
Fractional Product Leadership
Part-time product ownership. I set direction, make priorities explicit and run the work from discovery to delivery.1–2 days a week, for an initial 3–6 monthsDetails - 02
Product Strategy & Advisory
Decide where your product goes next, using customer evidence, business priorities and product data.4–6 weeks, then optional monthly advisoryDetails - 03
Focused Product Consulting
Work through one important product decision and leave with clear next actions.1–2 working sessions, then a progress reviewDetails - 04
Product Operations & Team Coaching
Build a consistent way to discover, prioritise and deliver, with clear roles and routines.6–8 weeks of workshops and implementation supportDetails
We agree scope and fees before starting. Ongoing work runs on a monthly fee, focused engagements on a project fee.
Also available: AI prototyping, AI product architecture
Role scope
What I can own in your team
I look for senior product roles with clear ownership, remote work and agreement on what matters most.
- 01
Product direction
Turn goals and customer needs into priorities and a roadmap the team understands.
- 02
Discovery and delivery
Define problems, test assumptions and ship improvements with design and engineering.
- 03
AI product development
Find useful AI applications, prototype them and define how to evaluate quality.
- 04
Team collaboration
Connect product, engineering and commercial teams through clear ownership.
Relevant roles: Senior Product Manager, AI Product Manager and Product Lead.
Results
We agree the measures before the work starts
We pick a few measures, set a baseline and agree when to review them, so the work connects to customer value and business results.
- 01
Customers reach value
Do people complete the key action that makes the product useful, and how quickly?
- 02
Customers stay
Repeat use, cancellations and the revenue you keep from existing customers.
- 03
The business benefits
Paid conversion, revenue from a new offer or time saved in a recurring workflow.
- 04
The team delivers
Priorities stay clear, decisions happen promptly and agreed work ships as planned.
Measures and targets depend on your product and baseline. We set them together at the start.
Process
How we get started
- 01
Understand
The product, the team and the decision or outcome that needs attention.
- 02
Agree scope
Responsibilities, capacity, deliverables and the measures we review.
- 03
Work together
I join the work, make decisions visible and move priorities forward.
- 04
Review
Check progress, update the plan and shape the next phase.
How I start a new role
- 01
Learn
Customers, business goals, existing evidence and how decisions get made.
- 02
Align
The product area, decision rights and first measures of success.
- 03
Deliver
Work the top opportunities, evaluate results and adjust with the team.
Selected work
Case studies, start to finish.
Products and companies I defined, designed and built, from the first strategy work through to something people can use. Open any one to read how I built it.
Ventures
Companies I founded.
Companies I started and led from the first idea, covering the product, the design and the route to market.
In their words
Recommendations, unedited.
These come from LinkedIn, written by the people who managed me, worked beside me and sat in my team. I reproduce each one word for word and link the profile so you can check it against the source.
I had the pleasure of working with Mario for several years, most recently with him reporting to me. Throughout our time, he proved to be a thorough, consistent and highly dependable key member within our product team.
I had a really great time working with Mario. As a Senior PM, he brought a ton of valuable business insight and always had a clear way of structuring problems and moving things forward.
Mario is a structured, driven and impact-oriented Senior Product Manager, it was a pleasure to work alongside and then later manage him.
Mario is a structured, reliable, and impact-driven Product Manager who genuinely cares about both results and people. He is a strong team player, always happy to recognize others' strengths, share his learnings, and help raise the overall level of the team.
Mario has this rare ability to understand the technology side ánd the commercial side of our business in a very balanced way, required to be successful at this complex intersection. This makes him an effective Product Manager in a hightech environment.
During my 6 years in Industry, I have never met someone so fresh and genius in a product management role. With Mario, it was always simple. He would take the complex issues and explained to us in such simple terms that it became pretty evident on what needs to be done where and how. He is a very open minded leader, one with a big heart and a good brain. I certainly enjoy sharing meetings with him and he always brings fresh perspective in my thinking. Apart from the professional role, he is a good coach who can help one get back on track if lost. In total, Mario is a complete blessing as a team mate that everyone needs. I hope he stays the same.
FAQ
Questions
Mario Sorgente
- Product Manager
- Artist
- Fitness coach
I'm Mario Sorgente, a Senior Product Manager with a physics background. I've managed energy products at Sympower, built AI products and started my own projects.
I take complicated problems apart, make the choices clear and get something useful into people's hands.
Product is my main work. I'm also an artist and a fitness coach.
Do you work remotely?
Yes, remote only. We agree overlap hours, channels and meeting rhythm upfront.
Fractional or full-time?
Mostly fractional. I'm also open to full-time when there's full alignment on priorities.
What does fractional mean?
I work with your team for part of the week and own a defined product scope. We agree which decisions I own and what progress to expect.
How much time do you commit?
One or two days a week, starting with three to six months. Focused consulting has a smaller, defined scope.
Leadership or advisory?
Leadership is ongoing ownership of product work. Advisory helps you decide through research, reviews and recommendations.
Can you build AI prototypes?
Yes, when a prototype helps answer a product question. We agree the scope first, including what production would need.
How do you define success?
An agreed outcome, a baseline and a review date. For short work, success can be a resolved decision and a clear plan.
What does it cost?
It depends on scope: a monthly fee for ongoing work, a project fee for focused engagements. The proposal lists everything it covers.
Which roles fit?
Senior Product Manager, AI Product Manager and Product Lead.
Are you open to B2B contracts?
Yes, B2B or employment. The right structure depends on the role.
What should an enquiry include?
Company, role description, remote setup, location requirements and compensation range.
Questions from my customers
Of Binderly, yourwAI, ADES, Devdok and all the products in your portfolio, which did you code yourself and what parts of the stack did you own?
Every one of them, end to end. The single exception is yourwAI, where I hired a software engineer, because the models were not good enough to build on at the time. Every product since is my own code, written with AI coding tools.
That means the whole stack. OpenAI for the model layer. Supabase and Firebase for data and auth, with Google Cloud Console handling OAuth. GitHub and Vercel for delivery. Hostinger and WordPress where a marketing site was the right answer. Codex and Claude Code for the building.
Across the portfolio that is roughly 60,000 lines in production and about 900 commits.
How often do you use Claude Code, Codex or Cursor and have you shipped pull requests into live products?
Daily when I am building something, several times a week otherwise. Codex and Claude Code for most of it, Cursor when I want to stay in the editor.
The work is hands-on. I work in the repository, read and change code, debug, review diffs and run deployments.
I ship to production on every product I own. At Sympower I was the PM rather than a committer on the core platform, leading the engineering teams.
What is the fastest you have taken an idea to a prototype and real user feedback?
Devdok, over a weekend. Idea on Friday, deployed on Sunday, first real users on Monday: about 48 hours to something live and 72 to the first feedback.
That was before coding agents, so the process was manual. I used ChatGPT to work out the architecture and generate files one by one, pasted them into GitHub, debugged the errors and redeployed. I built every part of it: the AI document-generation workflow, authentication, feedback capture and the deployment.
With Claude Code and Codex the same build now takes a day or less. The time goes into hardening the database, not into getting it working.
How hands-on are you with SQL, data analysis and reading experiment results?
Hands-on. I work in the data model rather than waiting on a dashboard: segmentation, funnels, cohorts and aggregations and enough digging into user behaviour to know what the numbers are actually describing. On yourwAI I ran the analytics myself across 1,000+ active users and 25 tracked events.
On experiments I read past the headline conversion rate: sample size, segment differences, downstream behaviour and whether the result supports the hypothesis at all.
When has the data contradicted your view and changed the product?
ADES, recently. After the first version I built an evaluation set of 15 representative cases with graders for the core workflows. The headline scores looked healthy: 4.7/5 on workflow clarity, 4.6/5 on evaluation quality.
The failure cases said otherwise. Structured outputs came back incomplete in roughly one run in five, and specific risk scenarios were handled too thinly to trust.
So I stopped polishing the UI around an apparently good model. I tightened the output contracts, reworked parts of the prompting and validation logic and added safeguards on the risk paths. Complete structured outputs went from about 80% to 98%.
How much have you owned B2C activation, retention, conversion and pricing?
A lot, mostly through yourwAI. I owned the funnel end to end: proposition, acquisition, onboarding, activation and the core matching experience, plus pricing, the business model, analytics and the feedback loop.
I iterated with behavioural data, direct user feedback and A/B tests, around 20 experiments across onboarding and activation. Onboarding completion moved from 41% to 63%, and the product reached 1,000+ active users and 170+ positive reviews.