I'm John Can Karayel. I've spent my career financing companies, building products and fixing customer experiences. Different jobs. Same question: what actually creates value?
Aligning product roadmap with revenue growth.
There is a reason I approach customer experience differently. I came at it from the business side first.
At BDC, Lighter Capital and Flow Capital, I worked with founders and operators on the economics of growth. Cash flow, risk, investment decisions. You learn pretty quickly that a great story isn't enough.
At Boast, I moved from funding businesses to owning a roadmap. We built tax-credit products, applied AI to evidence collection and launched a lending product. I learned the difference between an exciting feature and one customers actually use.
At WillowTree and TELUS Digital, I work with enterprise teams on the gaps between their product, customers, operations and technology. The work is part service design, part product strategy and part commercial judgment.
My approach is simple to explain, harder to do well. Connect the customer journey to what actually happens behind the scenes. Then translate the friction into a product, CX and AI roadmap with a clear business case.
“Where is my money?”
A customer wants to know why a transfer is still pending.
The status page provides no meaningful explanation or next step.
Transaction events exist in back-end systems, but aren't reaching the app or service team.
Expose live transaction milestones, add proactive updates and route true exceptions.
Size avoidable status contacts, repeat inquiries and the impact of trust on retention.
Not every problem needs an AI agent. Some need better product design. Some need cleaner policy. Some need a human with the right context. The trick is knowing which is which.
Customer touchpoints → Intent & decisioning → Shared context → Systems of record
Plus a feedback loop into the product roadmap. The stack should support the journey, not dictate it.My enterprise work spans banking, payments, hyperscalers, retail and consumer platforms. The specific constraints change, but there are recurring signals worth paying attention to.
Customers chase money movement, identity checks or pending disputes because systems aren't explaining what happens next.
Teams get stuck in eligibility rules, specialist escalation and context lost between customer-facing and support systems.
Order tracking, refunds and sizing issues turn into support demand that better digital journeys could have prevented.
From EV charging and onboarding to account recovery and retention, I look for the point where product friction turns into operating cost.
Sometimes the point is worth making without a 40-slide deck.
AI lets us build the wrong thing faster. That makes judgment, discovery and evidence more important, not less.
We keep treating avoidable contacts like an operations problem. What if the product team owned more of the fix?
Buy another tool if you want. But without the right context, decisions and systems behind it, you're adding a new layer to the old problem.
Especially if it sits somewhere between customer experience, product, growth and AI.