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Joel Montano

I'm a self taught programmer, currently working in product at Microsoft. I also advise Contenda on their growth and GTM strategy. Always happy to chat about my experiences in either! :)

I'm not tied to a specific industry and like to keep my interests broad. I know many of you have already tabbed out cause I'm another lowly "generalist" but I figured I'm too new to devote my career to a specific vertical, idk what half of them even are yet... One unifying theme is I want to build products that are solving hard problems and are easily accessible. Professionally, I've just worked in product but I'm interested in engineering, growth, and gtm roles as well!

Work stuff aside, I've been a fan of 100t through the "dark days", fan of the only relevant sport leagues in the US (I'll let you decide which those are) and I'm finally getting back into weightlifting and bougie traveling after the pandemic stole them from me. I'm always looking to meet and chat with new people, don't be afraid to DM me on Twitter if you wanna be friends or add me on LinkedIn if don't want me to take 3 months to get back to you.

I'm interested in engineering + engineering-adjacent roles. I'd want to get into the codebase and drive product development but still need a sprinkle of those external + customer facing funcions. Roles such as growth/gtm, customer success, dev advocacy, and product are all interesting to me! Some things I enjoy doing at work: coding, creating technical content, onboarding new customers, conducting user interviews, defining product needs and strategy, ending meetings early, shitposting, abusing custom slack emojis.

Education

University of Central Florida: BS in Civil Engineering, minor in Computer Science (2020)

Work Experience

Microsoft - Product Manager - Azure

Built internal tooling to improve cybersecurity posture of 1st and 3rd party facilities.

Basically, a lot of the work I did was sensitive. If you want/need more details, my email is below 😉

Don't fret! User research, stakeholder management, cross-functional collaboration, customer discovery, prototyping, etc. etc. I covered most of the product buzzwords in my day-to-day work.

Envision Accelerator - Ops & Growth

I made sure everything ran smoothly for the cohorts - office hours, mentor calls, etc. Used a mix of airtable and zapier to automate some of the process.

I fought for my life using webflow to update the website.

Transitioned to a growth role and handled external events, social media, and wrote the newsletter.

Mentored a few amazing companies in product, hiring, growth, and gtm. Now I'm an advisor for one lol

Projects

Learn with Joel

I should really write more, but I "Learn in Public" through this newsletter.

This Website

All HTML, CSS, and JS. itsnotmuchbutitshonestwork.jpg

Will be experimenting and adding more as I learn :)

In the Pipeline...

Rec League App

The Milo App

Whatever Wes Bos tells me in his JS 30 course