Dave Onkels — Product Leader in Healthcare

4 min read Original article ↗
dave onkels

Now: VP Digital Product at Humana

Rethinking how healthcare
gets delivered.

VP of Digital Product at Humana, working on how members access care across one of the country's largest Medicare populations. Previously led product for Amazon One Medical's Health AI assistant, scaled computer vision at Just Walk Out, led engagement for Kindle, and co-founded an acquired SaaS startup.

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Experience

VP, Digital Product

Leading digital product to reshape how members access care across one of the country's largest Medicare populations.

Medicare Healthcare Access Digital Product

Amazon One Medical

2021 — 2026

Head of Product & Design

Led product strategy for virtual care, culminating in the launch of the Health AI assistant—Amazon's first agentic AI in healthcare. Owned the product vision for AI-first care delivery across 30+ conditions, balancing clinical safety with consumer experience at scale.

Agentic AI Healthcare LLM Products Clinical AI

Amazon Just Walk Out

2018 — 2020

Principal Product Manager-Technical

Scaled the world's most advanced checkout-free shopping technology. Orchestrated computer vision and ML systems at the frontier of retail automation—hundreds of cameras, sensor fusion, real-time inference at scale.

Computer Vision ML at Scale Sensor Fusion Retail Tech

Amazon Kindle

2017 — 2018

Senior Product Manager-Technical

Led growth initiatives across Kindle devices and apps. Entry point into big tech—learned Amazon's mechanisms for operating at scale.

Growth Consumer Devices

Co-Founder → Acquired

Built an early SaaS platform for personal brand websites with integrated social media and custom CMS. Featured by Mashable and TechCrunch. Acquired in 2012.

Founder SaaS Exit

Earlier: Dotvita, Oven Bits, RadioShack, Identity Mark

1993 — 2017

Director of store design at national retailer, CPO for a mobile commerce platform, and BD lead managing carrier partnerships—foundations for my later work in retail tech and platform products.

Philosophy

Flip the problem

I look for the constraint everyone treats as fixed, then question whether it is.

Systems over heroics

Build systems, not heroes. The best implementations are boring and just work, reliably, at scale.

Builder mindset

Don't just specify; build. I run a homelab, prototype with local AI, and automate my own workflows. My passion for tech crosses over from work to play.

Thrive in the gray

Drive clarity where others stall. Navigate uncertainty; be that technical, ethical, or regulatory. This is where I add the most value.

“I'd rather ship a prototype than polish a spec.”

Things I'm Building Personally

Seattle Seasons

Interactive field guide to Seattle's 14 unofficial seasons. Drag the year wheel and the canvas drenches into each season's mood — apocalypse-orange Smoke, cherry-blossom Flowering Wet, drenched-navy Dark Wet.

Shelldex

A directory and leaderboard for OpenClaw-inspired personal AI agent projects. Tracks GitHub stats, growth, and rankings across 29+ projects in the ecosystem.

Open Source AI Agents

Labby

Native iOS companion for Homepage dashboards. Monitor services, browse with persistent sessions, and manage your homelab from anywhere—self-signed certs included.

CentralChat

Unified archive viewer for ChatGPT, Claude, and Raycast AI conversations. Full-text search across all platforms, entirely local—your AI history, searchable forever.

Agentic Workflows

N8N + local LLMs (Ollama) for automated triage, document processing, and context-aware routing. Privacy-first, self-hosted.

Memory Systems

PKM architecture in Obsidian with AI augmentation. Memory Guardian for context persistence, Daily Bootstrap for routine automation.

Home Automation

3,860+ entity Home Assistant deployment. Proxmox cluster, TrueNAS/ZFS, Frigate NVR, Tailscale mesh—systems thinking at home scale.

OpenClaw

Running a fully agentic personal AI setup on OpenClaw — 3 agents, 21 cron jobs, 7 channels. Building custom skills, contributing to the ecosystem, and daily-driving the future of personal AI.