$ whoami Justin Thames

Justin Thames

Senior Product Manager

Agentic AI Inside the Enterprise

View Impact View Experience

About Me

Husband and father. Outdoorsman, builder, AI enthusiast. Senior Product Manager with 14+ years across automotive technology, electronic vehicle registration, and luxury auction. I started my career as a machinist, programming production runs and watching raw material become a finished part. The instinct to take a problem, build something real, and see it land has never left.

My focus today is agentic AI inside the enterprise. The work is fitting agents into legacy architecture, established processes, and existing teams in a way that shortens operational timelines without losing the governance and rigor that make adoption sustainable. In practice that means production AI agents for the operational layer of PM work, rapid prototypes for problem discovery, and AI-native build efforts where product, engineering, and design all operate in agentic workflows together.

Doing this well takes both technical and business savvy. The business side is the empathy and listening with executives, operators, and stakeholders that gets me to the right problems in the first place. The technical side is the prototyping, agent orchestration, governance, and integration that turn those problems into shipped product. I do both, and that's where I work best.

AI Toolkit

Claude Code Development & Prototyping
Claude Design Design Exploration
Cursor AI-Native IDE
GitHub Copilot Code Assistance
Vercel v0 & Deployment
Convex AI Backend Platform

Impact

$5B Annual transaction volume managed
$1.2B GMV sourced
14M+ B2B transactions
648K B2C transactions
20% B2C transaction growth in 6 months
45% Revenue increase via API launch

Skills & Expertise

AI-Native Product Development

Build efforts where product, engineering, and design all operate in agentic workflows together. Compresses the cycle from concept to shipped product without losing the rigor that makes adoption stick.

Agentic Workflow Design

Production agents running on a regular cadence to compress the operational layer of PM work. Status, competitive monitoring, funnel analytics, executive briefs, and midweek change detection, all with governance baked in.

Platform Strategy & Redesign

Led full platform redesigns driving meaningful increases in conversion, engagement, and revenue. Experience across global luxury marketplace, automotive SaaS, and government-integrated transaction platforms.

Stakeholder & Executive Management

Building trust across all levels, C-suite to operators. Skilled at navigating organizational politics, cross-regional alignment, and translating technical complexity into clear business decisions.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Building automated analytics pipelines, funnel monitoring systems, and competitive intelligence programs. P&L management with high-margin platform products.

Cross-Industry Adaptability

Luxury auction, automotive technology, electronic vehicle registration. Each time diving deep, learning fast, and delivering meaningful results within complex regulatory and operational environments.

Product & Strategy

Strategic Planning & Roadmapping P&L Management Stakeholder & Executive Management Funnel Optimization & Conversion Market & Competitive Research Jobs-to-be-Done / ODI Agile / Scrum (CSPO) Cross-Functional Leadership Change Management User Research

Technical & AI

Agentic AI Orchestration AI/ML Product Strategy Agentic Workflow Design Context Engineering Enterprise AI Retrofitting AI-Native Development (Claude Code, Claude Design) AI Governance & Policy API Product Development Platform Redesign & UX Data Analytics (Amplitude, Tableau, BigQuery, Snowflake) AWS Infrastructure Legacy System Modernization End-to-End Product Development

Industry Knowledge

Luxury Goods / Auction Automotive Technology Electronic Vehicle Registration (EVR) E-commerce / Marketplace Platforms SaaS / Platform Products
CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner) Pragmatic Marketing Certified Strategyn: Outcome Driven Innovation (Jobs-to-be-Done)

Experience

Work History

Oct 2022 - Present

Senior Product Manager

Sotheby's

  • Lead a global online consignment platform serving sellers across many collecting categories.
  • Led a paired redesign of the client-facing submission experience and the internal specialist review application, driving record-breaking submission volume, faster time to submit, and accelerated internal processing.
  • Leading integration of AI-generated recommendations into the internal specialist review workflow, accelerating submission processing through data-informed decisioning.
  • Designed and operates a portfolio of production AI agents automating the operational layer of PM work (status reporting, competitive monitoring, funnel analytics, executive briefs, midweek change detection), with embedded security safeguards, credential management, and human-in-the-loop controls that double as the organizational governance pattern for AI adoption at scale.
  • Leading modernization of a legacy valuations platform across multiple regions as an AI-native build effort: product, engineering, and design all operating in agentic workflows to accelerate development.
  • Responsible for product roadmap, P&L, executive stakeholder relationships, and a team of product managers.
Sept 2016 - Oct 2022

Lead Product Manager

Dealertrack @ Cox Automotive

  • Managed automotive title and lien platform facilitating billions of dollars in transactions annually for major lienholders.
  • Launched API product layer enabling partner integration, increased revenue opportunity by 45%+.
  • Expanded into insurance and salvage verticals, increased revenue by 40%.
  • Led AWS infrastructure migration, improved margins by 35%+.
Oct 2011 - Sept 2016

Product Manager

AVRS (Acquired by CVR, CDK Global)

  • Joined near inception; helped grow EVR platform from MVP to 14 million transactions.
  • Targeted underserved small business market, then expanded into dealer vertical. Platform traction drove acquisition by CDK Global.
  • Managed full product lifecycle through startup growth, competitive expansion, and acquisition integration.

Projects

2026 - Present

Lean PM Skills

Open-Source Claude Code Plugin

  • Claude Code plugin with AI-native product management skills that compress mechanical PM work into hours (research synthesis, artifact generation, framework execution) so PMs focus on decisions, relationships, and problems worth solving.
  • Covers discovery & strategy, execution & delivery, alignment & communication, and operations & analysis with reusable reference guides and agentic workflows.
  • Available on GitHub.
2025 - Present

Simple Pitch Counter

iOS App, Solo Developer

  • Portfolio piece demonstrating that a product manager can define, design, develop, and ship a product end-to-end using AI-native development.
  • Built and shipped from concept through App Store deployment using Claude Code, full product ownership across the entire lifecycle.
  • Companion site at simplepitchcounter.com.