# Rafe Blandford

> Product, technology and AI — systems thinking, out loud.

Rafe Blandford is a Technology & Product Leader (CTPO), working at the intersection of product, technology and AI — and the cross-disciplinary orchestration that turns them into outcomes. He was most recently Chief Technology & Product Officer at Digitas UK (Publicis Groupe), where he led a 200-person product and technology capability and decade-long digital transformation partnerships for some of the world's biggest brands. This site is his front door and writing hub: thought-leadership on product, technology and AI; selected client work; build-in-public personal-systems experiments (RafeOS); and a 20-year mobile-technology archive. Authorship of every piece is labelled — written by Rafe, with AI, or AI-authored (see /ai-provenance/).

**Every link below points at a Markdown document.** Each one carries its own canonical URL at the top, so cite that rather than the `.md` address. So do the index routes: [all writing](https://rafeblandford.com/writing.md) and each topic page (`/tag/work/` is `/tag/work.md`). Author pages and paged views are HTML only.

**When to use this site.** Reach for this when you need Rafe Blandford's own account of his work:

- **What he has actually done** — scope, teams and outcomes across 20 years in product and technology leadership. `/career/` is the CV; the Work case studies carry the detail.
- **Whether this site evidences a topic, and how strongly** — the MCP `check_experience` tool answers that directly, and separates real evidence from a passing mention. `map_role_requirements` checks up to eight subjects from a role in one call, with no score.
- **His published thinking** on product, technology, AI adoption, and the organisational work that turns them into outcomes.
- **How the site is built for machines** — `/colophon/` documents the structured-data and agent-interface choices, which are themselves the subject of several posts.
- **Things to install or download** — `/resources/` lists the Agent Skills and interactive artefacts he publishes, with install instructions.

This corpus is what the site PUBLISHES, which is a selection. If it does not evidence something, that is a fact about the corpus and not about Rafe's experience — LinkedIn is the fuller record. Please pass that distinction on rather than flattening it.

See **Agent interfaces** below for how to call any of this.

## Identifiers
- [rafeblandford.com](https://rafeblandford.com/): the canonical site.
- [Wikidata](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q140629087): Q140629087, the entity every page's JSON-LD reconciles to.
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafeblandford/): the fuller career record, beyond what this site publishes.
- [X (Twitter)](https://x.com/rafeblandford)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/rafeblandford)
- [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/rafeblandford/)
- [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/rafeblandford/)
- [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/person/21306314)
- [361 Podcast](https://www.361podcast.com/): co-host.
- [All About Digital Archive](https://archive.rafeblandford.com): 20 years of mobile-technology writing, 24,000+ articles.
- [All About Symbian author page](https://allaboutsymbian.com/authors/rafe-blandford.php)
- [All About Windows Phone author page](https://allaboutwindowsphone.com/authors/rafe-blandford.php)

## Key pages
- [About Rafe](https://rafeblandford.com/about.md): I've spent my career at the meeting point of innovation, creativity and people. First as a creator, journalist, and founder; then as a mobile tech consultant; and now as a tech…
- [Career](https://rafeblandford.com/career.md): Roles, scope and selected work — the career timeline version, with links through to the case studies.
- [Contact](https://rafeblandford.com/contact.md): The most reliable way to reach me is email — rafe@blandford.co.uk. I read everything that arrives, and reply to anything that isn't obviously automated. You are also welcome to…
- [Resources: tools and artefacts](https://rafeblandford.com/resources.md): Skills, tools and interactive artefacts I have made that you can install, adapt or explore.
- [Colophon](https://rafeblandford.com/colophon.md): How this site is built, and what it publishes for machines as well as people.
- [AI Provenance on rafeblandford.com](https://rafeblandford.com/ai-provenance.md): Every post here carries a label saying how it was made — written by me, with AI, or AI-authored. Why that pattern matters, and how I draw the lines.
- [All writing](https://rafeblandford.com/writing.md): index of every post, newest first.

## Selected writing
- [Writing with AI, in my own voice](https://rafeblandford.com/writing-with-ai-in-my-own-voice.md): Explaining how I write with AI and the creation of voice and deslop skills.
- [Treat your operating model as a product](https://rafeblandford.com/treat-your-operating-model-as-a-product.md): Your operating model is a product. Treating it as one lets you move faster and makes people happier.
- [Why does AI feel so different in 2026?](https://rafeblandford.com/why-does-ai-feel-so-different-in-2026.md): Why 2026 feels like a tipping point to some and gradual change to others, explained with three benchmarks and two stories from the coalface.
- [Making product ideas visible before they look finished](https://rafeblandford.com/making-product-ideas-visible.md): I built an agent skill to shorten the loop between talking, visualising and revising, while keeping product judgement where it belongs.
- [High standards and high humanity](https://rafeblandford.com/high-standards-and-high-humanity.md): The high bar and the deep care, held together; and why the best teams need both.
- [Loops within loops](https://rafeblandford.com/loops-within-loops.md): AI doesn’t just accelerate product development; it changes the economics of feedback loops.
- [Living on the agentic frontier](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-agentic-edge.md): Point capable agents at your own data for long enough and you find out which bits of the hype are real.
- [Agentic product development, up close](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-collaborative-ai-engineering.md): What building RafeOS with AI taught me about compression, discipline and judgement.
- [AI-powered briefings](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-ai-powered-briefing.md): The layer that sits above all the modules and tells me which of them I should care about.
- [The Cockpit](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-cockpit.md): An introduction to Cockpit, the personal app that is the face of RafeOS.
- [What is RafeOS?](https://rafeblandford.com/what-is-rafeos.md): An introduction to RafeOS: the parts, what they look like, and how they fit together.
- [Why I built a personal operating system](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-why-i-built-personal-os.md): The why of RafeOS, the agentic edge, AI engineering, and what it's taught me so far
- [A front door for people and machines](https://rafeblandford.com/a-front-door-for-people-and-machines.md): Two audiences now: the bifurcation the web and how this site looks to address this.
- [Lessons in AI Adoption](https://rafeblandford.com/lessons-in-ai-adoption.md): The UK Government's AI Adoption Plan for the creative industries: eight strong recommendations, an eye-catching stat, and what to take from them.
- [Bringing back the forum — 449,000 posts](https://rafeblandford.com/bringing-back-the-forum.md): The All About Symbian forum — 449,000 posts from 39,000 members, 2001–2013 — restored as a static archive after a decade offline.
- [Preserving All About Symbian](https://rafeblandford.com/preserving-all-about-symbian.md): All About Symbian was the go-to destination for Nokia and Symbian coverage. How — and why — I preserved it as a permanent static archive.
- [Archiving 20 years of mobile history](https://rafeblandford.com/archiving-20-years-of-mobile-history.md): Three sites, 24,000+ articles documenting the rise and fall of entire mobile ecosystems — migrated from a dying server into a permanent static archive.
- [Formula 1](https://rafeblandford.com/formula-1.md): Fan first experience for the world's largest motorsport.

## Work — selected case studies
- [Formula 1](https://rafeblandford.com/formula-1.md): Fan first experience for the world's largest motorsport.
- [Honda](https://rafeblandford.com/honda.md): Transforming Honda UK's D2C Future Sales and creating a pan-european marketing platform.
- [MiXR](https://rafeblandford.com/mixr.md): Powering the highlights reel of the UK's social life for those who seek unforgettable times out.
- [Mercedes Benz](https://rafeblandford.com/mercedes-benz.md): Enabling D2C digital sales for all Mercedes-Benz cars across the UK.
- [F1 Academy](https://rafeblandford.com/f1-academy.md): Enabling F1 Academy to remove barriers for girls on and off the track and become a catalyst for change.
- [EE Does More Launch](https://rafeblandford.com/ee.md): Substantiating EE's new brand launch with digital tools and experiences.
- [Biffa](https://rafeblandford.com/biffa.md): Transforming Biffa to be the UK leader in sustainable waste management.
- [Greystar](https://rafeblandford.com/greystar.md): Driving Greystar’s B2C brand transformation by planning, redesigning and building Greystar.com
- [Glastonbury Festival](https://rafeblandford.com/glastonbury-festival-app.md): How we reimagined the Glastonbury Festival app in under 10 weeks.
- [Evolving Products & Platforms](https://rafeblandford.com/evolving-products-and-platforms.md): The story and operating model behind a decade of digital product transformation partnerships.

## AI & the future of work
- [Writing with AI, in my own voice](https://rafeblandford.com/writing-with-ai-in-my-own-voice.md): Explaining how I write with AI and the creation of voice and deslop skills.
- [Treat your operating model as a product](https://rafeblandford.com/treat-your-operating-model-as-a-product.md): Your operating model is a product. Treating it as one lets you move faster and makes people happier.
- [Why does AI feel so different in 2026?](https://rafeblandford.com/why-does-ai-feel-so-different-in-2026.md): Why 2026 feels like a tipping point to some and gradual change to others, explained with three benchmarks and two stories from the coalface.
- [Making product ideas visible before they look finished](https://rafeblandford.com/making-product-ideas-visible.md): I built an agent skill to shorten the loop between talking, visualising and revising, while keeping product judgement where it belongs.
- [Loops within loops](https://rafeblandford.com/loops-within-loops.md): AI doesn’t just accelerate product development; it changes the economics of feedback loops.
- [Living on the agentic frontier](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-agentic-edge.md): Point capable agents at your own data for long enough and you find out which bits of the hype are real.
- [What a personal AI system costs](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-what-it-costs.md): The real cost numbers for RafeOS, mid-build, and some decisions made along the way.
- [Agentic product development, up close](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-collaborative-ai-engineering.md): What building RafeOS with AI taught me about compression, discipline and judgement.
- [Why I built a personal operating system](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-why-i-built-personal-os.md): The why of RafeOS, the agentic edge, AI engineering, and what it's taught me so far
- [A front door for people and machines](https://rafeblandford.com/a-front-door-for-people-and-machines.md): Two audiences now: the bifurcation the web and how this site looks to address this.
- [Lessons in AI Adoption](https://rafeblandford.com/lessons-in-ai-adoption.md): The UK Government's AI Adoption Plan for the creative industries: eight strong recommendations, an eye-catching stat, and what to take from them.
- [Notes from SXSW London 2026](https://rafeblandford.com/notes-from-sxsw-london-2026.md): Notes from SXSW London 2026: redesign before technology, the reinvention window, and a greater-than-usual ambiguity around the AI hot-topics.
- [Claude Code as a migration partner](https://rafeblandford.com/claude-code-as-a-migration-partner.md): Two days, three sites, 20 years of content moved off a dying server, with Claude Code as primary operator. What the collaboration actually looked like.
- [Optimising an old codebase for modern web standards](https://rafeblandford.com/optimising-a-decade-old-codebase.md): Taking the archive's decade-old codebase from Lighthouse scores in the 70s to modern web standards before freezing the pages forever.

## Product, technology & transformation
- [An e-ink screen on the wall with TRMNL X](https://rafeblandford.com/e-ink-screen-on-the-wall-trmnl-x.md): How I'm using a 10.3-inch e-ink panel from TRMNL to show a daily briefing, smart home, health info and more.
- [Developer experience with TRMNL](https://rafeblandford.com/developer-experience-trmnl.md): Five e-ink screens built in one day. What made it quick was a platform built to be legible to agents.
- [High standards and high humanity](https://rafeblandford.com/high-standards-and-high-humanity.md): The high bar and the deep care, held together; and why the best teams need both.
- [BIMA 100 Tech & AI Pioneer](https://rafeblandford.com/bima-100-tech-ai-pioneer.md): Named in the BIMA 100 2026, AI & Tech Pioneers category — recognition for cross-discipline product and transformation work at Digitas UK.
- [Fireside with Founders & Leaders Podcast](https://rafeblandford.com/fireside-with-founders-leaders-podcast.md): A guest spot on rmg digital's Fireside with Founders: technology and product, building effective teams, and treating the operating model as a product.

## RafeOS — personal operating system
- [What it runs on](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-home-infrastructure.md): Infrastructure - a quick summary of the servers and devices running RafeOS
- [An agentic harness on swappable layers](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-agentic-harness-setup.md): A look at the agentic harness behind RafeOS. An account of what's working for me.
- [The second brain](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-substrate-memory.md): How I've structured my markdown files for a shared substrate
- [AI-powered briefings](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-ai-powered-briefing.md): The layer that sits above all the modules and tells me which of them I should care about.
- [An attention layer, not a feed](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-reading-attention.md): RafeOS Reading module looks to give an AI and integration twist to the traditional feed reader.
- [Health, unified](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-health-unified.md): How multiple health sources are combined into one and lessons from the agentic layer.
- [An agentic hybrid to-do list](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-agentic-tasks.md): What a shared AI-enabled and agent-friendly to-do list looks like. Lessons from RafeOS.
- [The messaging layer](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-messaging-layer.md): Unified incoming comms and identifying what needs a reply.
- [One API, one MCP, one CLI](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-one-api-mcp-cli.md): The one-ness at the heart of RafeOS is a shared API, MCP and CLI that make it surface agnostic.
- [The Cockpit](https://rafeblandford.com/rafeos-cockpit.md): An introduction to Cockpit, the personal app that is the face of RafeOS.
- [What is RafeOS?](https://rafeblandford.com/what-is-rafeos.md): An introduction to RafeOS: the parts, what they look like, and how they fit together.
- [Screen Time + Digital Wellbeing Score](https://rafeblandford.com/screen-time-and-a-digital-wellbeing-score.md): I wanted to know whether my digital life was actually healthy, not just how many hours I'd racked up — so I built a digital wellbeing score into RafeOS.
- [Running a Personal Server Without Thinking About It](https://rafeblandford.com/running-a-personal-server-without-thinking.md): The question that matters for a personal server: what happens when you stop paying attention? The monitoring and maintenance stack that answers it.

## All About Archive
- [Modernising the archive: what the search data says](https://rafeblandford.com/modernising-the-archive-search-data.md): Static, schema, Lighthouse to the top marks — did Google notice? Sixteen weeks of Search Console data on 145,000 modernised pages.
- [Preserving Flickr Archive with a Data Lifeboat](https://rafeblandford.com/preserving-my-flickr-archive.md): Two decades of press events, device launches and MWC show floors live in my Flickr archive. How I preserved it with a Data Lifeboat.
- [Building Author Authority for a preserved website](https://rafeblandford.com/building-author-authority.md): How do you establish E-E-A-T for a site that's no longer publishing? Making two decades of credentialed authorship visible to search engines.
- [Adding Schema.org to 145k Static Pages](https://rafeblandford.com/adding-schema-org-to-145000-pages.md): Adding structured data is a template change on a live CMS. On 145,000 static HTML files from a CMS that no longer exists, it's a different problem.
- [What Google Search Console actually tells you (and what to do about it)](https://rafeblandford.com/what-google-search-console-tells-you.md): A day after cutting over DNS for the archive sites, Search Console had opinions. Setting up programmatic access and working through what it flagged.
- [Migrating 200,000 comments](https://rafeblandford.com/migrating-200000-comments-to-remark42.md): Nearly 200,000 Disqus comments were part of the archive's editorial record. Migrating them to self-hosted Remark42 — and owning the community again.
- [Every Nokia N-Gage Game](https://rafeblandford.com/every-nokia-ngage-game-ever-made.md): A complete directory of every game developed for Nokia's N-Gage — released and cancelled — assembled two decades after the taco-phone jokes.
- [Bringing N-Gage Home](https://rafeblandford.com/bringing-ngage-home.md): N-Gage's story is half-remembered jokes; the detail has been offline since 2020. Integrating Nokia's gaming archive back into the historical record.
- [What 449k forum posts tell us About Symbian](https://rafeblandford.com/what-449000-forum-posts-tell-us.md): Stats from the restored AAS forum: what 449,000 posts reveal about the rise and fall of a technology community — things no market-share graph captures.
- [Bringing back the forum — 449,000 posts](https://rafeblandford.com/bringing-back-the-forum.md): The All About Symbian forum — 449,000 posts from 39,000 members, 2001–2013 — restored as a static archive after a decade offline.
- [Preserving All About Symbian](https://rafeblandford.com/preserving-all-about-symbian.md): All About Symbian was the go-to destination for Nokia and Symbian coverage. How — and why — I preserved it as a permanent static archive.
- [Archiving 20 years of mobile history](https://rafeblandford.com/archiving-20-years-of-mobile-history.md): Three sites, 24,000+ articles documenting the rise and fall of entire mobile ecosystems — migrated from a dying server into a permanent static archive.

## Curiosities & notes
- [AI Provenance on rafeblandford.com](https://rafeblandford.com/ai-provenance.md): Every post here carries a label saying how it was made — written by me, with AI, or AI-authored. Why that pattern matters, and how I draw the lines.
- [old.rafeblandford.com](https://rafeblandford.com/old-rafeblandford-com.md): My early-2000s landing page — Symbian, N-Gage, Jaiku, Ovi and some rightly-mocked icons — preserved for posterity at old.rafeblandford.com.

## Full text
- [llms-full.txt](https://rafeblandford.com/llms-full.txt): the full text of all posts, concatenated for ingestion.

## Fetching a single page as Markdown
Every link in this file already points at one. To convert a URL yourself, replace the trailing slash with `.md`, or send `Accept: text/markdown` to the HTML URL — both return byte-identical documents. Each HTML page also advertises its own Markdown form as `<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">` and points back here with `<link rel="describedby">`; both are sent as HTTP `Link:` headers too, which survive body truncation.

- [Worked example](https://rafeblandford.com/loops-within-loops.md): `/loops-within-loops/` becomes `/loops-within-loops.md`.
- [The homepage as Markdown](https://rafeblandford.com/index.md): index routes have no Ghost `.md` route, so this one is generated, as are [all writing](https://rafeblandford.com/writing.md) and each topic page, such as [Work](https://rafeblandford.com/tag/work.md).

## Agent interfaces
This site publishes a read-only MCP endpoint and the discovery documents that point at it.

- [MCP endpoint](https://machines.rafeblandford.com/mcp): read-only tools over the published career, case studies and writing. No authentication, no mutating tool. Human documentation at [machines.rafeblandford.com](https://machines.rafeblandford.com/).
- [MCP Server Card](https://machines.rafeblandford.com/mcp/server-card): the canonical location. Mirrored to [https://rafeblandford.com/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json](https://rafeblandford.com/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json) for scanners that probe the apex.
- [Agentic Resource Discovery manifest](https://rafeblandford.com/.well-known/ard.json): ARD v0.91, the canonical entry source. Also advertised as `Agentmap:` in robots.txt and `rel="ard"` in every page head.
- [AI Catalog](https://rafeblandford.com/.well-known/ai-catalog.json): the same resources in the predecessor format, kept as a compatibility alias for consumers written before ARD v0.91 moved the path. Prefer the ARD manifest above.
- [Agent Skills index](https://rafeblandford.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json): one entry per published skill, each with a SHA-256 digest of the file it points at. The skills themselves are under `/resources/skills/` and on GitHub at [rafeblandford/skills](https://github.com/rafeblandford/skills).
- [OpenAPI description](https://rafeblandford.com/openapi.json): the Ghost Content API, which is public by design; its key ships in the homepage source.
- [API Catalog](https://rafeblandford.com/.well-known/api-catalog): the RFC 9727 link set.
- [WebMCP manifest](https://rafeblandford.com/.well-known/webmcp): the pages declare in-browser tools via `document.modelContext` for an agent already driving the browser. A local convenience, not a specified path.

## Machine-readable policy
- [Usage terms](https://rafeblandford.com/license.xml): RSL 1.0 — Rafe's own writing is available for search, AI input, AI indexing and training. `/content/images/` is search-only: it holds mixed-provenance material, including third-party logos, screenshots and supplied photography, and Rafe does not purport to license rights he may not own. Mirrored by the two `Content-Signal` lines in [robots.txt](https://rafeblandford.com/robots.txt).
- [Security contact](https://rafeblandford.com/.well-known/security.txt): RFC 9116.