Signal: AI-powered landscape intelligence for animal advocacy organizations

The mentee owns one of three workstreams depending on skills and interests:

1. User research and product definition: interview 8 to 10 advocacy organizations, map their current intelligence workflows, and translate findings into a prioritized feature spec.
2. Technical build: extend the prototype toward automated monitoring (scheduled ingestion of defined sources, alerting on signal thresholds). Requires Python and API comfort.
3. Go-to-market: design and execute a pilot launch, including positioning, pilot recruitment, and a structured feedback loop with early users.

Expected output by November 9, depending on workstream: a user research report with validated feature spec; a working monitoring pipeline with at least three live sources; or a completed pilot with 3 to 5 organizations onboarded and feedback collected.

Must-haves:

• Bias toward shipping. The mentee should want to finish something in ten weeks, not explore indefinitely. Comfort making decisions with incomplete information matters more than any specific skill.
• Reliability on the basics: shows up to weekly calls prepared, communicates async between them, flags blockers early rather than going quiet.
• Genuine interest in animals as the beneficiary.
• Receptive to direct feedback. My style is concrete and candid; I'll tell you when a scope is too big or a positioning is weak, and that works best with someone who wants that.

Nice-to-haves:

• For the technical build track: Python and comfort working with APIs.
• Prior contact with advocacy organizations, or willingness to do cold outreach for user interviews.
• Experience writing for an audience (specs, memos, pitches), since most deliverables end in a document someone else acts on.
• Familiarity with the EA or AI x animals ecosystem, purely for shared context; I'm happy to be someone's introduction to it.

1. Which workstream interests you most (user research, technical build, or go-to-market), and why that one? If you're bringing your own idea instead, describe it in five sentences or fewer.
2. Describe something you've finished, in any domain: a project, event, piece of writing, tool, anything with a done state. What nearly stopped you from finishing, and what did you do about it?
3. Ten weeks is short. If you had to cut this project's scope in half in week three, what would you protect and what would you drop? (There's no right answer; I'm interested in how you reason about tradeoffs.)

• Shaping direction: This is my core offer. Scoping, prioritization, and de-risking: turning an ambition into a ten-week plan with a real deliverable, then re-scoping when reality intervenes. I'll push hard on "who is this for and why would they use it" until the answer is sharp.
• Structured feedback and drafting support: Weekly calls plus async review with fast turnaround on specs, positioning, outreach messages, interview guides, pitch documents, and landing copy. I edit at the level of argument and structure, not just wording.
• Domain expertise: Go-to-market and product marketing for AI products, from consumer scale (Gemini features on Google Search) to enterprise ($3M+ ARR product at Google Cloud). Practical fluency in user research, MVP definition, launch mechanics, and building on the Claude API.
• Accountability: A standing weekly cadence, clear owned next steps after every call, and early flagging when a timeline is slipping, so course-correction happens in week four rather than week nine.
• Connections: I completed the Sentient Futures fellowship and can make introductions where my network reaches, but I'd characterize connections as my lightest offer rather than a selling point. What I bring instead is strong cold-outreach craft: I'll help mentees identify the right people, write messages that get replies, and turn user interviews into relationships. In my experience that skill outlasts any borrowed network.