My Story

Jose Sanchez

Started as a market intelligence analyst in El Salvador. Moved to Korea on a government scholarship. Built growth systems for a company with no digital presence. Prototyped a product that turned into a software division. Now leading two platform products used daily by field teams across 95+ countries.

About

Building B2B software for the parts of a company that don't have an off-the-shelf solution.

Head of Product at The Base Solutions (TBS). Team: 2 product managers, 1 UX designer, 1 CS lead, 1 support, 5 internal developers, 2 pattern specialists, and 10 external engineers across four development partners.

The work is most interesting when the product problem is genuinely messy — where the hard part isn't the interface but the underlying rules, states, and workflows that make the system actually work across 10 countries and 4 user tiers. Workflow design, data model definition, permission systems, and ERP integration contracts are where most of the work happens.

Platform product strategy and system architecture (STEK EDGE, STEK ONE)
Cross-functional team leadership and stakeholder alignment
Zero-to-one execution: STEKSHIELD (100+ distributors, 3,500+ shops), CUTZ (3,000+ subscribers, ~$2M revenue)
GTM systems and growth infrastructure (16K+ leads, ARR growth $5M → $38M)
ERP integration and data normalization (SAP contract definition)
Multi-tier permission architecture and governance design

95+

Countries

Team Members Managed

$2M

Subscription Revenue Built

16K+

Inbound Leads Generated

The Journey

El Salvador, 2012–2014

Analytical Foundations

Operations analysis, economic research, and campaign analytics in resource-constrained environments.

Three different industries in two years — aviation operations, UN economic research, ad agency analytics. Each one had the same underlying problem: messy data, unclear ownership, and decisions being made without reliable information. At Aeroman, mapped 206 job roles across an aviation MRO serving Delta, JetBlue, and Southwest, conducting 1:1 interviews with C-level executives to validate role definitions that HR had never formally documented. At UNDP, cleaned and validated 5,000+ survey responses to produce the statistical foundation for El Salvador's 2013 Human Development Index. At Próxima, built the automated reporting dashboards that replaced manual data compilation for major consumer brands. The common thread: start with what exists, document what breaks, and build fixes that work within real constraints rather than ideal ones.

El Salvador, 2015–2016

Market Intelligence & B2B Strategy

Leading customer research and competitive analysis across 12 business units and 5 countries.

SigmaQ ran 12 separate packaging business units serving Unilever, Colgate, and Nestlé — each unit contacting the same customers independently, with no shared view of the relationship. Approximately $15M in annual revenue was drifting toward churn from fragmented communication and unresolved service failures. Conducted 300+ face-to-face interviews with decision-makers across 5 countries, bypassing the sales team to get unfiltered feedback directly to C-suite. Built the Lost Revenue due to Service Failure metric to give leadership a data-backed case for structural investment rather than anecdotal complaints. Identified that fragmented unit-level contact was the root cause, proposed a Multi-Account Manager role to consolidate account ownership, and got it approved and implemented. Reorders up 30%, quality complaints down 10%. The lesson that carried forward: the real problem is rarely what the first layer of feedback describes. You have to get past the filter.

South Korea, 2016–2018

International Transition

Building professional capability in a new market context.

Moved to South Korea on a government scholarship to pursue graduate studies while building professional context in a new market. This meant recalibrating communication approaches, building new professional networks from zero, and learning to operate across organizational and cultural differences that weren't visible from the outside. The practical result: a strong bias toward making the implicit explicit — asking direct questions, confirming shared understanding, and documenting decisions rather than assuming alignment. That habit became foundational later when coordinating product decisions across 90+ countries where a misread assumption compounds across every tier of the distribution chain.

Seoul, 2018–2022

Growth & GTM Systems

Building scalable acquisition infrastructure and go-to-market systems from zero.

At Noah, built growth systems for a Korean app matching foreign English teachers with local schools — 176% increase in monthly active users over the first year through SEO, App Store Optimization, and onboarding improvements tied to activation metrics. Moved to STEK the following year to do the same thing from a blank domain, except STEK had no website, no leads, and no marketing infrastructure of any kind. Built the full stack from scratch: site architecture, gated content portal, lead capture, email sequences, and trade show operations. Generated 16,000+ inbound leads during a period when ARR grew from $5M to $38M across 85+ countries. Delivered 3 SEMA shows at approximately 210% ROI per edition, executed go-to-market for 10 product launches averaging 68% open rate and a consistent 15% order lift, and organized distributor summits in Berlin and Korea as structured market intelligence sessions feeding directly into R&D priorities. Two years of running this showed that STEK's operational processes — lead routing, warranty claims — had no infrastructure to support the volume being generated. That gap became the next project.

Seoul, 2018–2022

Systems & Operations (Volunteer Work)

Building automation infrastructure and institutional partnerships for Korea's largest international founder community.

Served as a founding operator of Seoul Startups, scaling Korea's largest international founder community to 5,460+ verified members over five years — entirely volunteer-run, no paid staff, no marketing budget. Every recurring task started manual: event registration, newsletter delivery, member tracking, job post publishing. Introduced the no-code automation stack that replaced all of it, as manual coordination was the ceiling on how much the team could operate consistently. Organized 60+ events including 3 Techstars hackathons, grew a monthly newsletter to 5,000+ readers at a 65% sustained open rate, co-built a job board MVP with automated submission and publishing flows, and delivered institutional partnerships with Techstars, Google for Startups, WeWork, and multiple embassies. The parallel lesson from five years of volunteer product and operations work: systems that don't require constant intervention are the only kind that scale.

Seoul, 2019

Zero-to-One Execution

Co-founding The Last Box: IoT and mobile startup addressing household food waste.

Co-founded a hardware and mobile app startup to reduce household food waste, supported by the Asan Sanghoe pre-seed accelerator. Before committing to full hardware production, ran a pre-launch acquisition campaign that generated a 2,500-person waitlist — using early demand signal to sequence where to invest next. Coordinated MVP delivery across makerspace engineers, 3D printing labs, UX designers, and React Native developers, producing a working prototype integrating weight and ultrasonic sensors with inventory tracking and AI-powered recipe recommendations. Conducted qualitative research across Korea and Europe. The research showed that households were interested but wouldn't sustain a viable business at scale. Businesses managing food at volume had a more consistent and urgent problem, and were more willing to pay. Recommended redirecting toward B2B food management before committing further hardware investment. Won Best Pitch at the Asan Sanghoe program. The company paused at end of 2019 due to visa constraints after completing the Master's program — not a product failure, a logistical one.

Seoul, 2020–2022

Marketing-to-Product Transition

Prototyping an internal CRM that triggered the formation of STEK's Software division.

While running marketing at STEK, saw that inbound leads and warranty claims were completely unmanaged — scattered across WhatsApp and email with no structure, no routing logic, and no HQ visibility. Built a prototype to centralize both using available no-code tools, as no engineering budget existed for a formal build. When it worked well enough to show leadership, they used it as the case for forming a dedicated Software division. That division became the next job. The transition wasn't planned. It came from solving a real operational problem with the tools available and showing what was possible. The CRM prototype became the foundation for STEKSHIELD.

Seoul, 2022–2023

Product Ownership

Owning two parallel zero-to-one products: STEKSHIELD and CUTZ.

Founded STEK's software capability as its first product owner, with no prior internal software infrastructure, no established workflows, and no playbook. STEKSHIELD: Warranty and claims ran over email and messaging apps with no intake rules, no status tracking, and no way to audit decisions across regions. Replaced it with STEKSHIELD — workspace registration, role-based access across 4 user types, claims submission, approval workflows, and status tracking. Scaled to 100+ distributors and 3,500+ registered service providers. Reduced Quality Management first-response time from 48 hours to under one business day, lifting claim resolution rate to 98%. CUTZ: STEK had no pre-cut software for installers, which was limiting film adoption and creating a competitive gap against XPEL and Eastman. Evaluated available solutions, selected Mantis for speed to market, and built the full commercial model around it — subscription tiers, checkout flows, access management, and daily pattern request cycles with the vendor. Grew to 3,000+ subscribers and approximately $2M in revenue. Ran CUTZ as a structured learning environment, as no validated requirements existed for a proprietary platform — systematically collecting behavior data, friction points, and the hard limits of the vendor model. Those findings became the evidence base that shaped STEK EDGE and made the investment case defensible to leadership.

Seoul, 2023–Present

Product Leadership

Head of Product at TBS — leading two platform products and a team of 21.

Joined The Base Solutions as founding Head of Product when the company spun out from STEK to build software infrastructure at scale. Built the product organization from zero: 2 PMs, 1 UX designer, 1 CS lead, 1 support, 5 internal developers, 2 pattern specialists, and 10 external engineers across four development partners. STEK ONE: STEKSHIELD had validated demand, but couldn't scale to the full complexity of STEK's hierarchy or support the ERP data STEK needed to operate. Designed the role-based customer hierarchy covering HQ, factories, country distributors, sub-distributors, service providers, and end-consumers — with custom permission boundaries per tier, country, and business type. Defined the data contract between STEK ONE and SAP, as the MVP had relied on manual data entry and caused consistent user errors across regions — reducing data validation issues by 89% and cutting data-related support requests by 90%. Also built two service-provider-facing tools within STEK ONE: Sales Builder, automating quote generation for installer shops, and an AI Marketing Tool converting job photos into ready-to-post social media content. STEK EDGE: STEK's installers depended on a third-party cutting tool with no roadmap control, capping service quality and blocking commercial differentiation. Built STEK EDGE as a purpose-built replacement — a pattern library, a canvas editor, and direct output to plotter hardware. Designed the vehicle data model spanning 100,000+ cutting configurations across 10,000+ vehicles, defined the governance rule that lets HQ push quality updates globally without overwriting installer customizations, and coordinated compatibility across 10+ plotter manufacturers so adoption required no new hardware investment. Launched March 2026. Reduced average job completion time by 15%.

How I Lead

Clarity

Requirements, decisions, and ownership must be clear before work begins. Ambiguity creates rework. Effective product management means making the implicit explicit: what are we building, why, who owns it, and how do we know when it's done. Vague goals produce vague results.

Ownership

Own the problem through resolution, not just the initial handoff. This means confirming outcomes, closing loops, and ensuring the solution actually works in production. Ownership ends when the user can successfully complete the task, not when code ships.

Evidence Over Opinion

Product decisions should be grounded in user behavior data, system logs, support trends, or validated research — not assumptions or personal preferences. When evidence conflicts with intuition, evidence wins. Document what was learned and why decisions changed.

Direct Communication

Say what needs to be said clearly and directly, without making it personal. Effective cross-functional work requires addressing problems early, acknowledging constraints honestly, and giving feedback that improves work quality. Avoiding difficult conversations creates larger problems later.

Systems Over Heroics

Build repeatable processes that work without constant intervention. Sustainable product operations require documented workflows, clear escalation paths, and systems that new team members can understand. Dependence on individual heroics doesn't scale.

Work Within Reality

Product strategy must account for real organizational constraints: available resources, technical debt, team capacity, and market timing. The best product plan is one that can actually be executed with the team and resources available. Acknowledge constraints, then work systematically to expand them.

What I'm Looking For

Senior product leadership role (Senior PM, Lead PM, Head of Product) at a B2B SaaS or platform company with genuine operational complexity.
Team where product has strategic authority and works in close partnership with engineering, design, and commercial functions.
Company building for global markets where international experience and cross-cultural product work are valued, not footnoted.
Environment that prioritizes system thinking, clear requirements, and sustainable execution over feature velocity alone.