Josh Hart

As a product manager I've got a track record of building and shipping a consistently very high quality product, that satisfies a design brief but also a business brief. I'm good at straddling the line between effective product that delivers on usability and user requirements, and business and strategic goal setting, and where we should be going as an overall direction. I thrive best where I have to really think about the impacts and knock on effects to features that deliver value.

Every feature has to interact with a complicated back end that has a lot of caveats, and when I change one thing, it impacts a lot of other areas. Being able to see the threads and how they connect, and to think of all the edge cases and their impacts on other subsystems, that is really hard, and that's where I excel. I can ingest quite a large system into my mind and see quite intuitively where that has impacts. I've also got to assess the size of that feature, the complexity it might have, its value and the cost to build it. It saves me time when I don't need to speak to as many people to understand the cost of something.

I've got a good understanding of the hardware, the firmware, and the requirements of customers and installers, especially in the UK. That's the stuff that takes time to understand and learn. One of the true values of a PM is to be able to save money doing the wrong thing. Being able to say no is sometimes the most valuable thing I could say, along with the why. I work well in diverse teams of expertise. I enjoy working with designers, with developers at various different levels, and with products that span multiple areas of expertise. Unblocking people to ship fast and learn fast is one of the key challenges I've experienced in almost every business.

I've got an incredibly broad skill set. I can do everything from plumbing and soldering copper pipes, to pottery and jewellery craft, through to website design and development, to product marketing and product management, and now I'm developing skill sets in AI design and development. I can be set a task even if I don't necessarily know the skills required to achieve it, and I'll learn them very quickly.

What I'm looking for next is a role where I work hands on with product features and deliver value directly. I like working with development teams, especially getting ideas from them and understanding what they see would really improve the product, but I also love talking to customers and users and understanding from their perspectives what they'd find value out of. Getting a load of users in a room and helping extract learnings in a creative process with them is quite a delightful thing to do. I thrive in a creative zone, and there's a strategic creativity in it too, which is how we position ourselves and deliver features or products that delight unexpectedly. I want something where the KPI isn't just money. The KPI is people saved or people helped.