Matt Omernick · Creative Product Leader
What’s next,
into what’s real.
Executive product, creative, and technology leader developing experiences that improve the world we inhabit. My work explores the transformative power of games, AI, XR, storytelling, design, and emerging interactive technologies to engage, inspire, delight, and meaningfully impact people’s lives.
Games, health, AI, learning, entertainment, and emerging platforms, with teams ranging from startups to some of the most influential creative and technology companies in the world.
Akili Interactive
Lucasfilm
Microsoft
DreamWorks
Layer.ai
Buddy.ai
UC Berkeley
Disney
NetflixAbout
A rare mix of vision and execution.
For 25+ years, I’ve led the space between vision and execution: shaping the product, the story, the team, the experience, and the systems that make people come back. At Akili, I co-founded and helped build a new category at the intersection of games, neuroscience, and medicine, from early concept through FDA clearance, IPO, and acquisition.
I’m most useful when the opportunity is big, the shape is still fuzzy, and the work needs someone who can connect product, creative, technology, story, team, and execution into a direction people can actually move toward.
I care about products that earn attention with substance: products that create motivation, clarity, and trust, and make people’s lives a little more curious, capable, and alive.
More about me →My impact
From the first idea to the first ten thousand users.
I’m most valuable close to the center of an ambitious company, helping define what we’re building, why it matters, how it should feel, and how the team gets there. The work spans product vision, creative direction, experience design, engagement systems, storytelling, and the operating clarity needed to turn possibility into momentum.
Product Vision & Strategy
Translating fuzzy ambition into a sharp, ownable category position, product direction, and roadmap.
Creative Direction & Experience Design
Defining how a product should look, feel, sound, and flow, from first impression to long-term ritual.
AI & Emerging Tech Product Concepts
Shaping AI, XR, and spatial products that feel meaningfully native to the technology, not bolted on.
Engagement Loops & Motivation Design
Game-informed systems for trust, mastery, repeat use, and emotional resonance, without gimmicks.
Pitch & Investor Narrative
Story structure, decks, and proof points that help founders raise, partner, and recruit with clarity.
Prototyping & Product Definition
Hands-on UX, flows, prototypes, and visuals that make an idea tangible enough to align teams around.
Point of view
A few things I keep coming back to.
- 01
Technology only matters once it becomes human experience.
Devices, models, headsets, and frameworks are not the product. What people feel, do, and why they do it is.
- 02
Play is a serious design system.
The mechanics that make games motivating and fun, from clarity and feedback to progression and reward, are just as powerful in health, learning, and industry.
- 03
AI should amplify and push the evolution of human creativity, not dumb it down.
The important work is in giving creatives more power, more leverage, and more control, not less.
- 04
Vision is only clear and attainable when teams can see it and experience it.
Prototypes, interactions, sensory experiences, and shared language are how a strategy actually becomes something groundbreaking.
The right next chapter
Building something ambitious, and looking for the right creative/product leader?
I’m drawn to teams working at the edge of games, AI, XR, health, learning, and emerging interactive experiences, especially when the opportunity needs product, creative, technology, and team leadership in the same room.