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Certifications:
Aha! Product Management Professional Certificate

Frito Pie

Hello, I'm Joanna. I'm a product leader with a deep engineering background. I've shipped platform and customer-facing systems across fintech, e-commerce, and media. I run discovery, define requirements, own roadmap trade-offs, and I stay close enough to the technical work to know what's actually feasible.

I started as an engineer because I loved solving hard puzzles: finding the most elegant way to build a feature, or the root cause no one else could figure out. Early in my career, I took an engineering role at NYU Langone where I was responsible for managing their online fundraising platform. It wasn’t their main source of donations, but through market research and customer insight I was able to take a $60k a year afterthought to over $1 million in the first year. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just had my first taste of Product Management! From there, I continued to pursue engineering as a career. Over time the problems grew. How do we scale a service for a global user base? Is a simple queue enough, or do we need something durable like Temporal? Eventually I realized the biggest challenge wasn't how to build something, but what to build, when to build, and who to build for.

That’s the work that energizes me most. How do we prioritize competing feature requirements with limited resources? What is the right product strategy for our long term needs? These are large-scale problems that cross multiple disciplines and multiple teams. The creativity and rigor it takes to come up with solutions - and then be ready to revise them quickly as conditions change - is the most interesting and exciting challenge I’ve faced in my career so far. When I think about my experience at NYU Langone and how thrilling and rewarding it was to develop and launch a new fundraising product and watch it be successful, I realize I’ve been chasing that feeling all along as an engineer.

I’m now focused exclusively on product and I'm bringing my engineering expertise with me! If you have a role, someone you think I should talk to, or any advice, please reach out. I’d love to hear from you.

Most recent role: Engineering Manager at Justworks.

Resume: docx, pdf | email: joannahonikman@gmail.com

Projects

  • Coloring Books for Everyone
    An experiment with AI and Kindle Direct Publishing.

  • qor
    Personal organizational tool with AI capabilities. Case study

  • Job Tracker
    Part of qor. Prepares reports for DOL and tracks metrics. Case study

  • qor Digest
    Part of qor. Summarizes tech and product newsletters from gmail and saves articles of interest

  • Fable’s Fables
    Simple claude skill to generate tech/AI fables in the tone of Aesop’s Fables (it works with any LLM, but Fable’s Fables has a nice ring to it). [download]

  • Show, Don’t Tell
    A claude skill for replying to prompts visually - with FigJam diagrams instead of text. Case study

  • DisneyMath
    A not-remotely-affiliated-with-Disney chrome extension that calculates the real cost of your trip.
    Case Study | PRD