Justin Thames
Senior Product Manager
Agentic AI Inside the Enterprise
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
Impact
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
Technical & AI
Industry Knowledge
Experience
Work History
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.
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%+.
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
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.
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.