Privacy Product Foundations Sprint
A fixed twelve-week engagement that puts a defensible privacy and product foundation in place.
12-week fixed-scope project, milestone billing
Canadian privacy · AI governance · SaaS product
Your roadmap is adding privacy and AI risk faster than you can staff for it.
Senior product leadership for Canadian SaaS teams, Series A to pre-IPO, building with sensitive data and AI.
17
Years shipping products that handle sensitive data
9
Regulatory and AI frameworks the practice draws on
0
Cookies, trackers, or third-party scripts on this site
3
Ways to engage, from a fixed sprint to a fractional lead
The problem
Growth outruns the team that keeps it safe
Somewhere between Series A and Series C, the product moves faster than the people behind it.
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Features start touching sensitive data.
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AI goes from an experiment to a roadmap commitment.
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Privacy regulation starts deciding what your AI features are allowed to do.
That work sits between product, engineering, legal, and security, and it usually has no clear owner. Hiring a senior product leader with real privacy and AI depth takes months, when you can find one at all.
How to work together
Three ways in, one practice
Privacy Product Advisor
Senior judgement on your privacy and AI product decisions, month to month.
6-month minimum retainer, 4 to 5 days per month
Fractional Head of Product (Privacy and AI)
A senior product leader who owns strategy, roadmap, and regulatory-aware delivery, part-time.
6-month minimum retainer, 8 to 10 days per month
A ladder, not a menu: you decide at each step, and nothing is committed up front.
Before we talk
Whether this is your problem
A quick gut check. The fuller version, about whether you are ready to engage, sits on Services.
Sounds familiar
- Mid-market Canadian SaaS, roughly Series A through pre-IPO.
- Privacy regulation or AI features are actively shaping the roadmap.
- No senior product leader with privacy depth on staff, or one who wants a second opinion on a specific call.
Probably not this
- Privacy and AI are not yet changing what you build.
- You want a compliance document produced, not a product decision changed.
- The need is legal advice or an audit, which is a different profession.
The rules that shape the work
Frameworks in the room on every call
The live ones that matter, each stated as what it means for a product decision.
PIPEDA
The federal baseline for personal data. It sets how you handle consent, access, and breach response for any product with Canadian users.
Quebec Law 25
Live exposure for anything serving Quebec, from privacy impact assessments to stricter consent. It is also where privacy regulation reaches your AI directly: a decision made only by a machine has to be explained to the person it lands on, with the factors behind it and a route to a human.
Alberta and BC PIPA
The two provincial regimes that stand in for PIPEDA in their provinces. Same instincts, different thresholds, and Alberta is mid-reform.
Bill C-36 (PPCDA)
The third run at replacing PIPEDA, introduced June 2026 and still at second reading. Build with it in mind now and you avoid a retrofit later.
GDPR
The moment a Canadian SaaS signs a European customer. Lawful basis, transfers, and data subject rights become product decisions, not paperwork.
EU AI Act
Prohibitions and general-purpose duties already apply; the high-risk obligations were deferred to late 2027. That is runway to design for, not a reprieve to ignore.
ISO 42001
The AI management-system standard. The job is getting your governance to the point a certifying body can audit it.
NIST AI RMF
A voluntary framework for spotting and managing AI risk. We use it as a working scaffold for governance decisions.
NIST Privacy Framework
A way to manage privacy risk across the product lifecycle, mapped to the calls teams actually make.
Regulatory status verified 9 September 2026.
Credentials
The combination, not the collection
CISSPPMPPMC-VIIIPSMPSPOKepner-Tregoe
DIT candidate (Capella, 2027)MSc Information SystemsBSc Computer Science
None of these is rare on its own. Together, they mean the product call, the security posture, and the regulatory exposure get weighed in the same conversation.
Behind the practice
Founder-led, built on shipped work
HYNTYT is led by James Dreher, who spent seventeen years building privacy and security products at BlackBerry, Manulife, eSentire, and Qohash.
Canadian SaaS teams building with sensitive data and AI now get that same judgement, without the full-time hire.
Book a 30-minute fit call
Thirty minutes to see if it is a fit.
No pitch, no obligation.