AUSTIN, TX  |  FRIENDLY, SAY HOWDY

Hi, I’m Zach.

I disappear problems
with technology.

I’m a product and operations leader who turns messy real-world business quagmires into elegant tech and workflow solutions that lower stress across organizations. I handle problems big and small, drawing on a pool of top-shelf experts and specialists at RightPlace Consulting when the job needs a bigger bench.

My work helps lower blood pressure levels across organizations by creating systems and workflows that genuinely help.

Zach Arrington, standing in front of a corrugated metal wall lit in cyan and amber.

AT A GLANCE

ROLE
Product · Ops · AI
SCALE
3,000+ daily users
SHIPS
Base, ReUp, FieldWatch
M-B
INTJ

IMPORTANT NUMBERS

● YOU’RE ALIVE!
3,000+

DAILY EMPLOYEE & VENDOR USERS

1,064%

CHANNEL REVENUE GROWTH UNDER MY TENURE

40+

PROGRAMS DELIVERED ACROSS 20+ COUNTRIES

01 · MISSION STATEMENT · CORE COMPETENCIES

Some of My Favorite Problems

I do my best work when dumbo-dropped into situations where systems and business logic are unclear, outdated, or more complicated than they need to be. I like figuring out what should be easier, then making it so.

CLAIMSUBCLAIMEVIDENCE
01
Product & Systems Leadership
From ambitious ideas to executable products.

Is the destination clear, but the path obscured? I turn back-of-the-napkin ideas into products and systems that teams can successfully build, and into which businesses can actually grow.

BASE
vision production V1
02
AI & Accountable Automation
Turn AI work into documented, reusable systems.

AI is an insane goldfish with an omniscient grasp of all human achievement. Is it useful? Absolutely. But businesses need harnesses and guardrails to ensure security and data integrity - especially when regulatory risk matters.

MTG ORACLE + SHANGRI-LA
audit architecture
03
Operational Transformation
Make messy work simpler, faster, and easier to trust.

Software is only one element in a larger system. Old spreadsheets, manual handoffs, disconnected systems, duplicate information and outdated processes all generate organizational drag. I help businesses create documented processes and turn operational blockers into scalable workflows and durable systems.

MAJOR AIRLINE
3,000+ daily users

02 · EVIDENCE · TAKE A LOOK

Selected Work

A few things I’ve done well.

BASE

PIPELINE Ingestion Acquisition Data capture Transaction Home system
CASE 01 HEAD OF PRODUCT ● SHIPPED ● LEAD CASE

Global ambition, zero productGlobal ambition, zero product

I helped build BASE — a customizable 3D digital twin sales system for residential developers, spanning web software, Three.js, large data, custom pricing, quoting, analytics and a production pipeline for 3D models.

As the company’s first product leader, I turned that interconnected chaos into a phased product system, shared definitions of done, and an operating rhythm across product, engineering, 3D, design, delivery, sales, and external partners.

I helped take BASE, a customizable 3D digital twin sales system for residential developers, from zero to a production-ready Three.js and web application in less than 9 months. Our operations were AI-forward, placing emphasis on strong controls around human oversight of AI output.

Vision
revolutionize residential real estate sales
Process
establish PRD & product roadmap, decompose to units of work, execute
Result
V1.0 shipped and delivered
Ideation to MVP delivery in <9 months
EXPLORE BASE

RightPlace Consulting

CASE 02 · OPERATIONAL TRANSFORMATION ● LIVE · 10+ YEARS ● LIVE

Modernizing critical logistics systems at a major airline.Enterprise operations running on spreadsheets and a dream

Our client had critical maintenance, compliance, surveying, scheduling, reporting, and vendor-management processes constrained by legacy databases, spreadsheets, and manual handoffs.

At RightPlace Consulting, I helped translate that operating environment into a scalable web/mobile system that moved from MVP to beta markets to company-wide deployment.

At RPC, we took a chain of manual handoffs and disconnected systems and helped modernize the maintenance workflow of a major airline. Our team on this project has helped keep planes in the air for over a decade.

3,000+
DAILY EMPLOYEES & VENDORS
~6 months
TO MVP
10+ years
PARTNERSHIP
EXPLORE MY WORK WITH RPC EXPLORE MY WORK WITH RPC
WORKFLOWSTATUS
Excel spreadsheetsMANUAL
Access databasesMANUAL
Paper & email handoffsDELAYED
Field data entered laterDELAYED
ReportingLAGGING
Scheduling · logistics● LIVE
Budgeting · reporting● LIVE
Surveying · compliance● LIVE
Vendor KPIs● LIVE
Mobile field access● LIVE
MVP BETA MARKETS COMPANY-WIDE
Delivered with the RightPlace Consulting team; outcomes are engagement-level, not solo work.

Personal Projects

SHANGRI-LATHE APPLICATION THE ARCHITECTURE

CASE 03·THE MTG ORACLE◐ AUDITED

I made AI agents build me the MTG Oracle. Then I made them break it.

The MTG Oracle is a RAG-based web app designed to answer gameplay questions about the Magic: The Gathering card game. Yes, it’s nerdy. But it presented an opportunity to simultaneously test an adversarial cross-vendor AI approach to automated development, explore running AI agents like a true Product team, and create something that I could lord over my nerdy friends.

Then I commissioned an adversarial audit of the system.

The audit found 40 source-anchored issues across seven cross-cutting defect classes — including failures that individual component tests had previously missed. I turned those findings into a 10-phase remediation roadmap, then drove fixes through implementation, independent review, correction, and re-verification.

12 SUBSYSTEMS AUDITEDLOCAL
BACKENDAUTHPERSISTENCE/SPENDRETRIEVALSESSIONGUARDSCANONFRONTENDADMININFRA/CITESTSDOCS

Each could look healthy in isolation. The composed system did not.

40 SOURCE-ANCHORED FINDINGSSEVERITY
5 CRITICAL
17 HIGH
15 MEDIUM
3 LOW

7 CROSS-CUTTING DEFECT CLASSES

7 Silent outage & observability
5 CI & test blind spots
4 Detection without enforcement
4 Retrieval / production skew
2 Shared state across users
2 Frontend/backend contracts
1 Spend-control weakness

CLASSES ARE LINKED PATTERNS — ONE FINDING CAN FEED SEVERAL, SO COUNTS DO NOT SUM TO 40.

10 REMEDIATION PHASESIN PROGRESS
01020304050607080910

Later phases are not yet closed.

Green tests are great, but user experience is what counts.

CASE 04·SHANGRI-LA·◐ IN PROGRESS

Shangri-La | One Loop to rule them all

Shangri-La is an operating system for AI-powered software development. Rather than treating AI as a single brilliant-but-unreliable assistant, it organizes agents the way you’d organize a high-performing engineering team: shared context, defined roles, bounded authority, task ownership, independent review, and a durable record of what was decided and why.

The goal is to make autonomous AI useful for real, consequential work, not just demos. Shangri-La gives teams a framework for turning complex objectives into coordinated agent workflows while keeping humans in control: agents can plan, execute, review one another’s work, draw from canonical project knowledge, and produce evidence for their decisions, with guardrails that govern what they can change and when human approval is required.

PIPELINE · 10 STAGESWORK FLOW
DEFINE
01 Intake02 Decompose03 Memorialize
BUILD +
CHALLENGE
04 Execute05 Verify06 Review07 Correct

CORRECT RE-REVIEW UNTIL THE EVIDENCE CONVERGES.

SHIP
08 Integrate09 Stage10 Production

◧ HUMAN AUTHORITY AT INTAKE · STAGE · PRODUCTION. 02–08 IS MACHINE WORK UNDER DETERMINISTIC GUARDRAILS.

WHO DECIDES WHATJUDGMENT MAP
Human Author · ratifiesProject Manager · holds the milestone
ARCHITECTPERSISTENT LAYER
Executor Builds the bounded work, returns evidence.
Reviewer blind · cross-vendor Sees ticket, diff, CI evidence. Not the executor’s narrative.

ARCHITECT ROUTES · CORRECT · ACCEPT · ESCALATE TO HUMAN.

◧ HUMAN AUTHORITY HOLDS AT INTAKE · STAGE · PRODUCTION.

2 review cycles 2 distinct real guardrail bugs caught.

FULL UNATTENDED END-TO-END BAR: NOT YET PROVEN — FUTURE EVIDENCE.

When managing AI Agents, you need accountability that scales.

Zach Arrington holding a coffee mug in a room hung with framed paintings.

03 · BIO · THE SHORT VERSION

About

I started my career in financial services, where more than a decade as an analyst and operations leader gave me first-hand exposure to regulated environments, operational risk, manual workflows, reporting needs, and the real cost of poorly designed systems. I later moved into technology leadership, working across product strategy, software delivery, technical architecture, and development teams.

The throughline has stayed the same: understand how businesses actually work, translate messy problems into clear systems, and keep execution tied to measurable value. Today I work across product, operations, and AI - helping teams move from “something isn’t working” to a diagnosis, a practical scope, and something people can actually use.

04 · SERVICES · A LA CARTE

How I can help

If you’re hearing complaints from your team about a process or system causing drag, that’s a good place to start.

  1. 01

    Manual & repetitive workflows

    Duplicate entry, status chasing, recurring handoffs, and workarounds that have become normal.

  2. 02

    Data & reporting

    Useful information trapped in databases, spreadsheets, CRMs, inboxes, or other systems instead of reaching the people who need it.

  3. 03

    Systems & integrations

    Tools that do not talk to each other, fragmented workflows, and information that has to be manually moved between systems.

  4. 04

    Internal tools & websites

    Custom tools, portals, forms, or websites that create friction or no longer match how the business actually operates.

  5. 05

    AI-assisted workflows

    Research, summarization, routing, analysis, alerts, drafting, and other repeatable work where AI creates real leverage.

AI isn’t always the answer

But sometimes it is. AI is one tool among many. Sometimes a simpler, traditional fix is better. We’ll work together to determine the best solution during our initial scoping audit.

Start small: one problem. One clearly defined piece of work. One measurable result.

I can execute many engagements solo. When deeper expertise is needed, I can draw on the roster of experienced engineers, designers and data scientists at RightPlace Consulting.

START A CONVERSATION

05 · CONTACT · OPEN INBOX

Have a workflow, system, or AI problem worth untangling?

Let’s rap about it.

No form. No funnel. Just Zach.