Mehdi Shabestari
I turn complex infrastructure into products people can use.
Twenty years up the stack — analog telephony, enterprise networks, datacenters, cloud platforms — and, since 2022, product decisions for cloud services used by hundreds of thousands of people. I speak fluent engineering and fluent business, and I'm most useful where the two don't translate themselves.
- 20 years
- from PSTN to AI-era infrastructure
- Hundreds of thousands
- people using services I help shape
- 5 chapters
- support → network → datacenter → product
Selected impact
What changed because I was in the room — described the way infrastructure people describe things: qualitatively, and only where the evidence supports it.
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Cloud services at population scale
Product direction for infrastructure services used by hundreds of thousands of people — where the roadmap is made of promises and every default removes a thousand bad decisions.
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A NOC that held through 2020
Led the network operations room when the world's traffic moved indoors: escalation paths people trusted, handovers that survived the night, and an incident language engineering could act on.
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Voice platforms for real customers
Eleven years in telephony while the phone network became software — administering, engineering, and leading the systems businesses ran their calls on.
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This site, as a working argument
A bilingual, accessible, 180-page knowledge platform — typed content models, static generation, zero trackers — that practices the product thinking it documents.
Problems I help solve
Not a skill list — the situations where I create the most value.
Productizing complex infrastructure
Turn technically deep infrastructure into a product customers can understand, evaluate and operate — without lying about what's underneath.
Platform and cloud product direction
Define what gets built when reliability is the product: which promises to make, how to phrase them honestly, and what each one costs to keep.
Product ↔ engineering translation
Convert architecture constraints into roadmap choices a business can evaluate — and business goals into constraints engineering respects.
Enterprise and technical buyers
Keep the whole cast coherent: the engineer who integrates, the operator at 3 a.m., the finance owner, the security reviewer — one product, four audiences.
Discovery on technical systems
Take an ambiguous platform problem from signals — usage, tickets, postmortems, prospect questions — to product definition and execution.
AI-era infrastructure products
Apply the same discipline to the newest rung of the ladder: turning AI capability into infrastructure people can depend on, not just demo.
Featured work
Three case studies from the practice — judgment, constraints, trade-offs — plus the site you're reading, documented like it matters.
Product decisions for cloud services at scale
Technical product management for infrastructure services used by hundreds of thousands of people — where reliability is the product and the best UX is less UX.
The room where the internet stays up
Leading a Network Operations Center through 2020: incident response as applied epistemology — what do we know, how do we know it, who needs to know it next.
Voice becomes software
Eleven years in telephony while the phone network was rewritten as software — from administering VoIP systems to leading voice infrastructure for real customers.
How I think
Principles earned the long way — each one traceable to an incident, a trade-off, or a system that stayed up (or didn't).
The stack under the product
One career, climbed bottom to top. Product decisions made here are grounded in what each layer actually does when it fails — because I have been the person it failed on.
Product
Direction, promises, defaults — since 2022
Cloud & platform
Fleets, control planes, abstractions — 2019
Networking
Routing, switching, the paths packets take — 2012
Telecom
Voice, signaling, the century of copper — 2007
Systems
The physical layer that answers eventually
Most product managers learn this stack from slide decks. I learned it from pager alerts — which is why my roadmaps tend to remember the on-call rotation.
From analog to cloud native
The unusual part of this career is the direction: I didn't move from business into product vocabulary — I climbed the entire stack first. The product judgment has the smell of the datacenter on it.
- A home computer, a mailed Linux CD
- Voice becomes software — VoIP at Tel4Tel
- Under the cables — networks and voice at FCP
- The abstraction ladder — cloud, then the NOC room
- Infrastructure as a product
Selected writing
Longer arguments behind the one-liners.
- Why Infrastructure Products Are DifferentUsers don't want your product. They want what it makes possible — and infrastructure product management starts from that asymmetry.
- What Twenty Years of Infrastructure Change Taught MeNotes from 2007 to now: the patterns that survived every platform shift, from PBX consoles to cloud control planes.
- From PBX to Cloud CommunicationsWhat is lost and what is gained when the phone system stops being a room with a hum and becomes an API call.
Beyond work
The rest of this site is the rest of me: three thousand years of communication history mapped as a timeline, the thinkers who sharpened the questions, and a quiet corner to breathe.
- 3,000 years of communication technology115 events from the Phoenician alphabet to packet switching — because the network you're reading this on has a three-millennia warm-up.Humanity →
- Ideas are the oldest technologyThirty-four thinkers across Greek, Eastern, Persian and modern traditions, and the questions they kept asking.Ideas →
- Be hereUptime is my profession; presence is the same discipline pointed inward. A small breathing space, no gamification.Mind →
Let's build something difficult.
If you're hiring for a technical product role, shaping a cloud or AI infrastructure product, or want a second brain that has actually carried a pager — I'd like to hear about it.
Discuss a role
Technical product management, platform and infrastructure product roles — especially where engineering credibility is part of the job description.
Start the conversation →Discuss a project
Productizing complex infrastructure, discovery on technical systems, or a product strategy problem that needs someone who can read the architecture.
Tell me about it →Look around first
Case studies, principles, and the journey that produced them — everything is one click from here.
Explore the work →