Dan Barker

Who they are

Dan Barker is Senior Director of Product at Typeform — previously co-founded Enlitened, a consumer-plus-SaaS platform for student wellbeing and university analytics.

Person

Dan studied at Cass Business School (BSc Hons, 2012), then added a Full-Stack Web Development Immersive at General Assembly in 2014 — a deliberate move to get hands-on with the code beneath the products he was building. He started in education-adjacent ops at Debate Mate Online as Product & Operations Lead, then crossed into research-tech at Prolific as a Senior Product Manager. In between, he co-founded Enlitened in 2018 — a continuous improvement platform for universities with a consumer app delivering personalised content to students and a SaaS layer letting universities analyse that engagement data. After Enlitened he moved into consulting as an EdTech Product Consultant at Enlitened, before joining Typeform in January 2024, climbing from Group Product Manager to Director of Product Management and now Senior Director of Product. The through-line is education and data: every move sits at the intersection of helping people learn or perform better and giving institutions the analytics to act on it. He posts occasionally on LinkedIn, with themes spanning AI-native product design, platform and data strategy, and product leadership.

How they likely show up

  • Co-founded Enlitened while also holding an EdTech consulting role → high agency, comfortable carrying founder-level accountability alongside employed work.
  • Went back to General Assembly for a Full-Stack Web Development certificate after a business-school degree → actively closes his own skill gaps rather than delegating technical understanding.
  • Climbed from Group PM to Director to Senior Director inside Typeform within roughly 18 months → moves fast when given a platform, likely pushes for scope and ownership early.
  • Content themes include AI-native product design and platform/data strategy → thinks structurally about how products scale, not just feature-by-feature.
  • Operator role pattern with a founded-company chapter → probably bridges strategic framing and execution detail better than a pure career PM would.
  • Occasional LinkedIn poster rather than prolific publisher → shares selectively; likely values quality of signal over volume.

Conversation tips

  • → Ask about Enlitened specifically — he built both the consumer app and the SaaS analytics layer, so he has strong opinions about dual-sided product design that most PMs don't.
  • → He'll respond well to precise product questions; don't stay high-level — he coded, he founded, he's been in the detail.
  • → Reference the Typeform trajectory (GPM → Director → Senior Director in under two years) — he'll have a clear narrative about what changed at each step.
  • → Avoid framing AI as a feature add-on; his content themes suggest he thinks about AI-native design from first principles.
  • → He's based in Stoke d'Abernon, outside London — if scheduling matters, he's likely not a daily London commuter.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on Enlitened — he co-founded a platform in 2018 that paired a student-facing consumer app with a university-facing SaaS analytics layer, a genuinely unusual dual-sided architecture that most edtech avoided.
  • Reference the General Assembly certificate — a business-school graduate who went back to learn full-stack development is making a deliberate statement about how he wants to understand products, and it's a natural conversation starter.
  • Lead with the GPM-to-Senior Director arc at Typeform across roughly 18 months — ask what shifted at each step, since that trajectory suggests he has a clear theory about how product leadership scales.

Discovery questions

  1. With Enlitened you had to serve two very different users — students and university administrators — on the same data. How did that shape how you think about platform products at Typeform?
  2. You went from founding and consulting in edtech to Prolific (research data) to Typeform — what drew you toward form and data-collection infrastructure specifically?
  3. Your content themes include AI-native product design — what does 'AI-native' mean to you in practice versus a product that's just added AI features?

Avoid

Don't treat his edtech background as a detour — it's central to his product thinking, and glossing over it to jump straight to Typeform will signal you haven't done the work.

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on June 4, 2026. Each claim is linked to its source above.

Automatically generated by AI from public sources. May be inaccurate or out of date. Remove or correct this profile →