>_ The spec is the product. Everything else is noise.

Janaka Ediriweera

Principal AI & Product Management Consultant · specshop.dev · Colombo, Sri Lanka

Janaka Ediriweera is an AI consultant and product management consultant based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He leads specshop.dev, an AI consultancy and AI agency that puts AI agents to work inside businesses — with a named person approving every action — and advises engineering organisations on AI-native delivery. He has twenty years in technology, twelve of them in product roles, nine of those spec-first, and has shipped 120+ products across Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, Australia, Oman and the UAE, including products for a national stock exchange and regulated banks. He trained 150+ startups for RMIT Activator in Melbourne. He is the founder of Humanised Technology Solutions (Pvt) Ltd., the Colombo company behind specshop.dev, its AI consultancy and AI agency brand, and Humanised, its HR and payroll brand.

// That paragraph is written for the machines. The rest is for you.

• AI consulting for businesses. I tell you which rung you’re on — tools, handover, or learning — and which piece of work should be handed to an agent first. If none of our six candidates fit, I’ll say so. Most of this work is with accounting, corporate-services, legal and clinic owners in Sri Lanka and the Gulf who want the work done, not another dashboard. See the roster →
• AI-native delivery for engineering organisations. Where the leverage actually sits, what to restructure, what to stop building. We ship production software with teams of two to three, not six to eight; I show your engineering org how, then run a supervised pilot on your own backlog so the number is yours, not ours. CV 05, Delivery Engineer →
• Product management, upstream of all of it. Business case, PRD, architecture review, clickable prototype, work broken into chunks small enough that an agent can’t wander off. Available as a fractional or interim head of product for companies that need the spec written properly before anyone — human or agent — writes code. Book a 30-minute call →

How an engagement with Janaka runs.

Three steps, in this order, with the price published before each one. There is no discovery phase with the rate card withheld.

1. The thirty-minute call — free

You tell me the work that wears your team down. I tell you which rung you are on and which piece of work should be handed to an agent first — an honest answer, including “not yet”. Book it on WhatsApp at +94 76 443 7726 or take the booking link below. Nothing is invoiced for this call, and no proposal follows it unless you ask for one.

2. The workflow mapping sprint — US$2,300

Two video sessions with you and whoever actually does the work. We map your three busiest workflows, put staff-hours against each, and show an agent working on one of your own anonymised cases. You get a written report within 48 hours that says which workflow to hand over first and which ones an agent must not touch. If you hire an agent within 30 days, the whole US$2,300 is credited against the recruitment fee. This is the consulting half, and for some firms it is the only thing they should buy.

3. Hand-off to the team

If the report says automate, the specshop.dev team takes it from there. An AI agent from the roster starts at US$1,225 a month for a junior post, with a one-off recruitment fee of US$9,500 and a 30-day measured probation — see the six CVs and the terms. If the work is your product rather than your back office, an embedded AI engineer joins your team for three, six or twelve months at a fixed engagement price and spends the first fortnight mapping. Either way I lead the engagement with the people who run it. There are no account managers and no junior consultants.

// the prices above are the published ones — the same numbers are on the roster page and in what AI automation costs in Sri Lanka, in rupees and dollars

Most software fails before a developer writes a single line of code. It fails in the spec, or the absence of one.

I spent a decade proving this across finance, legal and government in five countries. Designed and managed products for a national stock exchange and one of Sri Lanka’s top investment banks. Redesigned a core banking platform. Built micro-lending and payroll-backed lending products for regulated finance companies. Led the country’s first fully digital customer onboarding with digital KYC, end to end — 50,000 customers in the first six months.

I was a true Agile believer through most of it. Move fast, document less.

Then AI agents started writing better code than most dev teams — and reading specs literally. Vague documentation stopped being a culture quirk and became a catastrophic failure mode.

So I tested the alternative the only way that counts. Built and exited two products where the entire operating model was: describe the work in plain language, AI executes, a human confirms before anything moves. Both shipped. Both ran on that principle. Both handed off in August 2026.

Now the work is upstream of all of it — and on the harder problem: harnesses, self-improving agent systems that don’t just execute a spec but tighten it. That research is B-Spec, and it’s what the specshop roster runs on.

// Everything here is on LinkedIn. Nothing here is a projection.

• specshop.dev — Principal AI & Product Management Consultant, 2026–present
  AI consultancy and AI agency, Colombo · Muscat · Dubai. A team of seven, every engagement end to end.
• lankantax.com — Co-founder, 2026. Exited August 2026.
  Sri Lankan tax-filing platform. Designed the UX, wrote every user story, ran the build through an agentic engineering process — agents executing against detailed specs, humans confirming before anything shipped. Delivery, onboarding and support ran with two people. Partnered with four chartered tax firms before launch.
• Humanised Payroll — Founder, 2021–2026. Exited August 2026.
  First Sri Lankan payroll product to run bulk payroll straight from a spreadsheet and output bank transfer files for every local bank format plus EPF, ETF and T10 filings. Scaled to 2,500+ employee payrolls; twelve chartered firms acquired outbound; page-one SEO on five commercial intents. Automated over 40% of support and success, so three people ran the whole company.
• Beta Launch — Founder / Principal Product Manager, 2018–2026
  Product consultancy across Sri Lanka, Australia, the Netherlands, Oman and the UAE. Banks, fintechs, legal platforms. Trained 150+ startups for RMIT Activator and USAID. Built the first ISO 27001-certified fully remote operation in the region. Closed in March 2026, deliberately: consulting is helping you do it; the future is delivering outcomes.
• Before that
  Business Analyst, Common Code (Melbourne, acquired by Ackama). Solutions Analyst, Hendry Group (acquired). CS Research Officer, RMIT University, recipient of the RMIT Activator Capital Fund 2018.
• Education
  Master of Business Information Technology, RMIT University. BSc (Hons) Computing, University of Portsmouth.

Colombo, Sri Lanka, most weeks. Muscat and Dubai for engagements in Oman and the UAE. The rest of the time from a small farm in Haputale — off-grid, solar-powered, Starlink-connected, growing my own food. Same principle runs everything: design the system properly upfront, or spend forever fixing what breaks downstream.

I work in English, on WhatsApp, in your time zone.

Thirty minutes. Tell me the work that wears your team down, and I’ll tell you whether this is worth your time.

// Or read first: the Specshop Journal → · LinkedIn → · B-Spec, the research →

Read next.

• If you want the job description rather than the biography, we have written out what an AI product management consultant does, including a week on a hypothetical engagement and what each shape costs.