Product leadership · Customer-facing B2B & B2C products
Jason Emerich. Director of Product Management, with nine years leading B2B and B2C product organizations on top of eight years in engineering. Mobile apps, enterprise platforms, connected hardware, two-sided marketplaces, e-commerce, and applied AI. I still get out on site with the people who use what my teams build. The work starts in a truck yard or a shop bay, not a roadmap tool.
Selected work
Mobile, connected hardware, a two-sided marketplace, consumer e-commerce, workflow systems, and applied AI. Different shapes, same job: find out what people actually need, then get it built and shipped. All of these reached production and real users.
Product Manager, then Manager of Digital Products
I pitched it, got the executive funding, and launched it: a mobile app for people whose office is a truck cab, covering inspections, hours, and roadside events. It grew through on-site research with drivers rather than feature requests from headquarters.
Director of Product Management
A proprietary Bluetooth device reading straight off the vehicle bus, shipping over-the-air firmware updates to users in the field. Hardware, firmware, and app on one roadmap, plus a multi-year Canadian certification run across product, engineering, and legal.
Director of Product Management
Replaced a paper process with a digital one wired into the core business systems, so a reported defect lands in the maintenance queue instead of riding around in a cab on a carbon copy.
Product Manager
Treated a breakdown as a live event instead of a support ticket: repair progress as it happens, technician location on the way, and a push notification at each step so nobody is sitting there guessing.
Director of Product Management
Web and mobile products that brought independent repair shops into the maintenance system: submitting work, passing validation, moving through approvals and billing. Neither side shows up until the other one already has, so sequencing the rollout was most of the problem.
Director of Product Management
A national six-month initiative mapping the journey for both customers and branch employees across web, mobile, and in store. I was in the field for it. The maps turned into specific changes to the steps people were abandoning, plus new mobile capability.
Director of Product Management
Three consumer properties. I treated conversion as a research question first: go find out where people stall, then design the experiment. Redesigns shipped behind A/B tests built on field research and job mapping rather than a list of guesses.
Director of Product Management
Directed AI-driven analysis of customer preferences for repair approvals, and shaped the customer-facing insights layer on a large ML platform. The hard part was never the model. It was making a prediction clear enough that someone would act on it.
How I work
I have never learned anything important about a product in a conference room. On-site observation, ride-alongs, and job mapping are the input. Every team I have led has picked up the habit, and every time the roadmap got shorter and better.
Not a partner function I check in with. I sit in the research sessions, work through the journey, and argue about what a screen has to make obvious before anyone writes a ticket. Nielsen Norman certified, though the habit matters more than the certificate.
A clickable prototype settles arguments a spec cannot, and it exposes the workflow you quietly assumed away. I would rather burn a week building the wrong thing small than a quarter building it at scale.
Eight years in telecom, mobile device management, and desktop engineering before product. I can read a constraint, question an estimate, and tell the difference between hard and tedious.
I have grown an organization from four to twenty and hired more than ten PMs, but headcount is the least interesting part. A team that spends every hour on delivery and meetings stops being a product team. I protect time for discovery, competitive work, and prototyping, cut process that is not earning its keep, set clear guardrails, and let people own the problem instead of the ticket.
I use it to shorten the distance between an idea and something I can react to: research synthesis, competitive analysis, API gap analysis, early specs, working prototypes. It means I can explore a lot more before I commit a team to any of it.
Featured · Independent project
FleetPulse is an independent prototype: a fleet management platform, twelve connected modules, simulated data. It sits where four parts of my background meet. Years in the domain told me what to build. Product thinking shaped the workflows. UX decided what each screen had to make obvious. AI got me from thinking to something interactive in days instead of a quarter.
847 vehicles, 267 drivers, 6 regions, 14 tax jurisdictions. Live telemetry, hours-of-service compliance, maintenance and work orders, driver inspections, licensing, routing, cost per mile, and quarterly fuel tax. Simulated data, no backend. Go click around.
It is a prototype with simulated data, not production software. What I wanted to show is how quickly I can get from knowing a domain to something you can click and argue with.
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Experience
Holman
Product leadership across a portfolio of ten-plus platforms spanning asset management, licensing and registration, purchasing, and B2B and B2C remarketing. I lead a twenty-person organization and set the multi-year strategy across it. I also brought on-site research and prototyping into a group that had not worked that way, which is why a 200-plus user platform rollout landed with far fewer post-launch problems than the last one.
Penske Transportation Solutions
Owned strategy and delivery across operations, maintenance billing, service provider management, repair workflows, and driver compliance. Grew the organization from eight to eighteen PMs across eight teams, built the two-year roadmaps that carried capital approvals, and reported strategy and results to executives every month.
Penske Transportation Solutions
Built the mobile product function from nothing and launched two apps from zero to one, then took on the flagship B2B web portal. Hired more than ten PMs and built the onboarding program that cut ramp time in half. On-site research and journey mapping became standard practice here.
Penske Transportation Solutions
Full ownership of two iOS and Android products end to end. Launched the driver app now used by 80,000-plus people, and more than tripled adoption of the fleet manager app through on-site research and a short list of the right features.
Penske Transportation Solutions
Eight years building and running infrastructure for a 40,000-person company. It is where the technical fluency comes from, and why I ask different questions in an architecture review.
Credentials
Tools & practice
I am always interested in how other teams are solving this. If you are working on a customer-facing product with real complexity, I would like to hear about it.