Austin, Texas · Independent executive consulting
Productive Solutions is an independent executive consulting practice applying 30+ years of product, payments, and technology operating experience — diagnosing complex problems, implementing emerging technology, and building solutions that scale.
How we work
We don't start with a product to sell. The recommendation is whatever the evidence supports — including the advice to do nothing. What follows isn't a fixed process; it's what the work leans on, in whatever proportion the problem calls for.
To the owner first, then to the staff who do the work — those are rarely the same problem. We ask what you need now, what's next, and what it looks like in a perfect world.
Establish the actual problem before anything gets designed around it. A stalled project is often a well-built answer to the wrong question.
Independent work on the options — tools, vendors, integration paths, and the operational and compliance constraints you actually run under. No vendor is assumed.
Findings go through multiple frontier models and get verified against source rather than taken on trust — then checked once more for whether something simpler or cheaper does the same job.
You see what's behind a recommendation before committing to it. Sometimes that's a working demo, sometimes it's the analysis and the numbers. What it isn't is a signature page and a promise.
Engagements get sized to the problem — sometimes a two-week diagnostic, sometimes a six-month build — and you'll know which one you're looking at before you commit to either. What doesn't change is the standard: nothing gets recommended until we've checked whether a simpler answer does the job, and until it fits the way you actually run. It's hard work to make something look simple.
Areas of focus
Which one fits is usually clear within the first conversation, and occasionally the answer is that none of them do.
Most organizations don't have an AI problem — they have a workflow problem AI might solve. We help firms move from curiosity to working systems: identifying the processes where AI genuinely earns its keep, selecting vendors on merit rather than momentum, designing integrations that respect the systems you already run, and managing rollout inside real operational and compliance constraints. The result is AI doing a job, not AI as a science project.
When a software effort drifts over budget or off course, the hardest thing to find is a clear-eyed answer. We deliver one: a current-state assessment of what's actually been built, gap analysis against what was promised, profiles of the team you actually need, and a direct recommendation — continue, restructure, or restart. Decades of building and buying software mean we've seen how these efforts fail, and what it takes to fix them. Delivered in days, not months.
Advice is better when the advisor builds. We design, build, and ship our own AI systems — production agents with real API integrations, running on real schedules — and prototype client-facing products with AI-native tooling. That working fluency is what separates implementation guidance grounded in experience from slideware.
About
Josh Wiles founded Productive Solutions in 1995. The name went quiet not long after — the work moved inside the companies he went on to found and run — but it was never a different practice: complex technology problems, diagnosed honestly and built to work. Three decades and two acquisitions later, it operates under its own name again.
Most of those three decades were spent in payments and government services, building companies rather than advising them.
He founded Novo Dia Group and led it for sixteen years, building the TotilPay product line: mobile point-of-sale for EBT, SNAP, and card processing, deployed in all 50 U.S. states and scaled to 3,500+ merchant terminals, with annual payment throughput growing 20x from launch to peak. NDG was acquired in 2025.
Before that, as SVP at Affiliated Computer Services, he ran the nation's second-largest EBT processing business and served as CIO of a division supporting more than $1B in revenue with 950 technology staff. ACS arrived by way of Transaction Processing Specialists, the company he co-founded, whose EPPIC system pioneered web-based EBT transaction processing before ACS acquired it.
That work produced patents. He is a named inventor on two: one covering the electronic processing of government-sponsored benefits (US 8,340,979), one covering the management of distributed transaction processes (US 8,554,728) — the problem of keeping a benefits network correct when part of it goes down.
The through-line: complex, regulated, high-stakes systems that had to work — built, scaled, and carried through acquisition, twice. That experience is now pointed at organizations that don't have a technology department to lean on.
Eight years as Vice Chair of Technology, eGovernment Payments Council
Contact
Tell us what you're wrestling with — a stalled project, an AI initiative that needs to get real, a decision that needs a clear-eyed outside view. We'll tell you honestly whether we can help.
Direct: josh@prodsolve.com
Austin, Texas · Working with clients everywhere