Gary Willmott

🚀 Scrappy Product Leader | Startup Founder | Product Growth Specialist

Prev. GoDaddy (Product), Hi5 (exited), Delta (Venture Architect)

📓 About

Hi I'm Gary Willmott 👋I'm a curious, optimistic product guy who cut his teeth on code when 640x480 was considered cutting-edge. My reputation as a resourceful product manager with a demonstrated history of tech industry success stems from my ability to orchestrate cohesive, efficient teams and deliver exceptional digital products that captivate customers. With more than 15 years of experience across established organizations and my own startup ventures, here are some career highlights:- Spearheaded the introduction of a groundbreaking product at GoDaddy, solidifying their position in the social-first entrepreneur community.
- Consulted at The Delta, playing a pivotal role in investing in and advising founders as they honed and validated their startup concepts.
- Pioneered my own SaaS HR startup, named Hi5, which attracted over 4,000 customers and exited profitably in Jan 2024.I don't get hired by later-stage companies to help them run like a big company. I'm hired to remind them how to run like a startup.I'm currently leading product at TAIWA, focused on leveraging AI-first technology to promote human transformation.

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🤹🏻 Skills

  • Conducting customer interviews and user testing.

  • User experience and wireframe design

  • Running design sprints

  • Feature prioritization and roadmap planning

  • Resource allocation planning

  • Performing market assessments

  • Translating business-to-technical requirements, and vice versa

  • Pricing and revenue modeling

  • Defining and tracking success metrics

  • NoCode development for early stage product validation

🙏 Praises

Gary is the rare product leader who is relentlessly focused on the customer while also giving himself and others space to innovate and try new things. On day one, he stepped into a very challenging project that had seen a lot of recent turnover and was able to rally the team together around a shared vision. Gary always makes sure that every voice is heard, and he excels at coordinating the moving pieces required to consistently ship value to customers. As a research lead working with Gary, I always knew that customer feedback would be incorporated thoughtfully into every step.
Patrick Ward - Lead Researcher GoDaddy & Buffer
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I worked with Gary on launching Social Site at GoDaddy. His tenacity to keep the team on track and launch the product was admirable. Even with all the dependencies on marketing and engineering, he steered the ship successfully to launch the product. He is laser focused on the customer experience and needs, and that always shows in his work, whether it is ideating on the next iteration or fine tuning the existing user flow. He doesn't let processes come in his way, and always finds a way to speed up the process, work around them, or suggest new ways to ensure the launch happen in full!
Raghu Prabhu - Product Marketing at GoDaddy
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I have had the pleasure of working with Gary as a leading start-up founder, during this time I have always been amazed at his level of enthusiasm, dedication and positive attitude towards solving everyday problems through building world class software. Gary's understanding of the product management lifecycle, the challenges in writing code, and the importance of UI/UX make him an outstanding product manager. I am excited to watch him grow from strength to strength during this exciting time of emerging technologies.
Ryan Paterson - Investor and Advisor