# Justin Grant > Head of Product in B2B/SaaS Startups Location: Berkeley, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/justingrant Product leader at Bay Area startups, with long-term focus on Vertical SaaS, B2B UX, APIs, and making machine-generated data useful. I like to solve complicated business problems by making software that's easy for normal people to use! Specialties: - The software side of the Internet of Things (IoT) - Consumer-quality user experience for web & mobile business apps - "Crossing the Chasm" from early adopters to mainstream customers - Producing actionable analytics at terabyte scale - B2B2C: delivering customizable software solutions for our customers' customers - Building a customer-focused, data-driven culture - Efficient teamwork with scary-smart engineers ## Work Experience ### Head of Product @ AON3D Jan 2023 – Present Building a SaaS business (strategy, roadmap, UX, pricing, and day-to-day execution) for a leading manufacturer of aerospace-grade 3D printers, and mentoring AON3D's small-but-mighty team. ### API Designer / Invited Expert @ ECMA TC39 (the JavaScript standards body) Jan 2020 – Present As a volunteer, co-leading the open-source team that designed the JavaScript "Temporal" date & time API: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-temporal. On track to ship in browsers and Node.js in 2025. ### Head of Product @ UpCodes Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco, California, United States Led Product, Growth, and Design at early-stage startup providing SaaS tools for building-code compliance in the construction industry. • Grew paid signup rate 3.6x. Improved usability & discoverability of paid features. Streamlined activation funnel. Found incremental growth opportunities throughout the product. • Managed cross-functional team owning PM, Growth, Design, and Subject-Matter Experts. • Defined and drove product strategy. Coalesced founders’ vision + customer input into a two-track roadmap: PLG to generate cash and qualify leads, in parallel with TAM-expanding enterprise features. • Resigned to deal with two deaths in my family. ### Founder @ Hangle Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 Bootstrapped an easier way to schedule time to see friends in person, like Uber for hangouts. Designed mobile-first UX, built MVP, and was on track for early-adopter release. Then COVID hit! 🦠 I kept going for a while longer, but with unclear demand and without realistic customer usage I ultimately decided to fold. ### VP Product Management @ Cantaloupe Systems Jan 2011 – Jan 2018 Led product strategy and PM execution for the leading SaaS provider of remote monitoring, analytics, mobile apps, and cashless payment solutions for the worldwide vending industry. After an $85M exit, led PM for the acquirer for a year before leaving to work on my own startup ideas and side projects. • Led a high-productivity PM team focused on SaaS web and mobile apps that help vending operators improve logistics efficiency, process payments, prevent theft, boost sales, and accurately report on business performance. • Owned the roadmap. Coalesced customer input, long-term strategy, and competitive threats into aggressive but pragmatic product roadmap... and then partnered with engineers, sales, marketing, customer success, and our customers to turn roadmap into reality. • Balanced resources and schedules across multiple product lines. Ensured that important-but-not-urgent priorities weren't neglected. Supported Agile engineering process with user-story/task definition and prioritization, bug triage, etc. Negotiated with engineering, sales, and customers to get the best bang for scarce resources and scarce calendar time. • Drove user experience strategy and execution, with focus on user-interaction design to make our B2B mobile and web apps easy to use for low-tech users. Built mockups and UI prototypes (Photoshop, HTML, CSS, hacky Javascript, etc.) to validate design ideas. ### Senior Product Manager @ Splunk Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 PM #4 in pre-IPO big-data/analytics startup. Focused on making Splunk a better platform for application developers. • Drove Splunk's online product strategy. Revived Splunkbase (http://splunkbase.com), Splunk's app marketplace. Launched Splunk Answers (http://answers.splunk.com), diverting thousands of support calls in its first year. • Defined Splunk's first Application Management and Operations Management apps. Managed a cross-functional app-building team responsible for building those apps. • Improved Splunk's products and application framework to help software developers building apps on Splunk. ### Group Product Manager, MSDN and TechNet @ Microsoft Jan 2003 – Jan 2009 PM for http://msdn.microsoft.com and http://technet.microsoft.com, Microsoft's flagship community sites for Developers and IT-Pros. • Grew traffic to 25M visitors/month • Integrated social applications (forums, wiki, etc.), lowering support cost & improving content. Built search & metrics strategy for social apps. • Built customer-focused, data-driven culture. Aligned priorities to customer needs. Defined segmentation. Started usability testing. Introduced self-service analytics to mine customer feedback. • Drove overhaul of site navigation to reduce costs and enable globalization to 12+ languages and 40+ local markets. • Turned around 2 struggling cross-functional Agile teams. Maintained prioritized product backlog. Ran daily standups. Defined iteration schedule. • Drove team to fix in-site Search. Improved satisfaction, quality, and performance. Defined success metrics and helped teams exceed them. • Defined and deployed Web Analytics strategy, including "build and buy" solution which optimized cost and flexibility. • Maintained direct technical impact (e.g. built UI prototypes for MSDN Search, schema & ETL optimization of 1.5TB relational data warehouse) ### Group Program Mananger - Server Management Products @ Microsoft Jan 1998 – Jan 2003 • Co-founded "internal startup" team that defined and built Application Center 2000, Microsoft’s first web application management product. Defined product vision, customer segmentation, and roadmap. Managed the PM team for this V1.0 product from inception to release. • Led a team which grew to 20 PMs responsible for feature definition, prioritization, and execution for multiple Data Center Management products. Balanced resources across multiple products and versions. • Drove consolidation of multiple products into a single, more profitable offering. Led planning to define features of the merged product. • Awarded US Patents #6961681, #7043566, #6981267, #7278103 ### Director, Research and Development @ Stockpoint.com (acquired; now part of News Corp) Jan 1997 – Jan 1998 • Engineering lead of Stockpoint’s SaaS applications and B2C website. Built web framework enabling low-cost customization. Increased team productivity while lowering costs. • Served as technical architect. Improved site availability and scalability. Optimized database throughput. Solved performance bottlenecks. Presented at industry conferences. • Managed site operations team. Implemented automated app deployment and monitoring. • Technical liaison to clients and business teams. Drafted technology-specific portions of proposals and contracts. Managed partner relationships. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Ask Jeeves (formerly Desktop Software, Inc.) Jan 1989 – Jan 1996 Employee #3 / full-stack engineer. Part-time college job turned into full-time role building the earliest versions of askjeeves.com as well as bootstrap-supporting consulting projects in C/C++, x86 assembly, etc. ## Education ### B.A. in English, B.A., Environmental Design (Architecture) University of California, Berkeley ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/justingrantjg - Website: https://www.saaspm.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/justingrant JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/justingrant/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-08