thoughtbot's Incubator Program is back for a third round! This episode introduces founder Josh Herzig-Marks of Knect, and he will be sharing his journey from freelance work to joining the program and what happens throughout! So far, he appreciates the deliberate communication practices required for practical remote work, despite remote work already being second nature to him, and he understands the importance of proactive and transparent communication in a team setting.
One critical insight for Josh so far was the misconception surrounding the term "CRM" in personal relationship management. His moment involved mislabeling a survey, which led to confusion about the project's intent.
As the Incubator Program progresses and continues to scale, Jordyn expresses excitement about involving more teams with different geographic focuses. The goal is to foster a collaborative environment within the thoughtbot Incubator Slack channel, encouraging past and present participants to share experiences and advice.
We invite listeners who resonate with any of the challenges heard or have potential solutions to reach out! Our next Incubator episode will introduce our other Session 3 participants, Mike and Chris, founders of Goodz.
Follow Josh Herzig-Marx on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaherzigmarx/) or X (https://twitter.com/herzigma). Visit his website at joshua.herzig-marx.com (https://joshua.herzig-marx.com/).
Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/).
Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots!
Transcript:
LINDSEY: My name is Lindsey Christensen, and I head up marketing for thoughtbot. For anyone listening or joining who isn't familiar with thoughtbot, we're a product design and development consultancy that helps you make great products and help make your team a success.
One of the very cool ways we do that is with the thoughtbot Startup Incubator, which is a program that we launched this year and that Jordyn, who's with us today, has been heading up. What's up, Jordyn? And today, what we're going to be doing is catching up with one of the latest founders who's participating in the incubator and seeing what he's been up to since the kickoff over these last two weeks.
JOSH: It's been two weeks. It's been two really fast weeks.
LINDSEY: [laughs] Josh, could you give us a little introduction to yourself?
JOSH: Sure. I'm Josh. Hi. I've been in tech product management for, like, 20-ish years, 15 or so of those were in head-of-product roles. And a bunch of those early on were my own startup, where I discovered I was a pretty mediocre founder but really liked this product leadership thing. I had a very lucky exit, which I leveraged into a series of first product manager, first head of product, first product leader roles at a series of early-stage companies across a ton of domains: B2B, B2C, FinTech, mobile, Revtech.
And then, a little over a year ago, my partner and I got to do this thing we've been talking about for a while, which was we swapped who the primary parent was. We have two kids, two teens, 13 and 15, right now, so that's eighth grade and ninth grade. I wanted to take over primary parenting so that they could focus as much or as little on their career as they wanted to in the same way they had allowed me to do for the first 15-ish years of our kids being kids.
And if I were a better person, I would have found some kind of job that allowed for work-life balance, but I'm not. I have a whopping case of ADD, which we'll probably come back to later on in this conversation. And the way that I knew I'd be able to actually fulfill my responsibility as a primary parent was by retiring from salaried work. So, I did that a little over a year ago, last summer. And kind of keep me busy and occupied in between 8:30 in the morning, you know, school drop off and 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon school pickup.
And when I'm not doing shopping, and c