James Hendrie
I help businesses grow through craft
For over a decade, I've grown businesses by building whatever they needed — revenue engines, design systems, sales operations, AI products. I care most about finding the highest-leverage problem and sticking around long enough to see the compounding results.
Location
Williamsport, PA
Current Role
Systems Architect, Xtego Creative
Education
B.S. Software Dev
Specialties
Product Design, Sales & Growth, Technical Craft
The Short Version
I started in New York building brands and digital products for clients — logos, apps, campaigns. Then I went deeper: running R&D for a physical product company, then building a $25M revenue engine for a copper recycling operation where I did everything from cold-calling 100 yards a day to designing the entire brand system.
Now I've joined Xtego Creative as a Systems Architect — a role that lets me lean into the systems-thinking and business-building strengths I've been sharpening across every chapter of my career.
Across all of it — design, engineering, sales, product — the work I gravitate toward is finding the highest-leverage problem and building the system around it.
Design
Brand systems, UI/UX, visual identity. Over a decade of craft across digital and physical products.
Code
Full-stack development, AI/ML products, and the technical architecture to make ideas real.
Growth
Revenue systems, outbound engines, and the sales instinct to know what actually converts.
How I Work
Three principles I keep coming back to
Stay Close to the Customer
The best product instincts come from ongoing contact with the people you're building for — not just during discovery, but throughout the entire lifecycle. That's how you catch what analytics miss.
Ship to Learn
Strategy decks don't survive contact with real users. I prototype fast, get working software in front of people early, and let real feedback shape the direction. The goal isn't perfection on the first pass — it's conviction by the third. That bias toward action compounds over time.
Diverge, Then Align
I widen the aperture before narrowing it — pulling in cross-functional perspectives and stress-testing assumptions before converging on a clear direction. The goal isn't consensus; it's commitment. When people feel heard, they move faster.
Why I Do This
People are the point.
At the end of the day, what drives me is creating real value for people. Meeting business objectives, shipping stunning interfaces, building systems that scale — all of that matters because of the lives it touches. Software has been an incredible vehicle for that: a way to positively impact people at a scale that still feels personal when you get the details right.
I get genuine joy from helping people — it's the reason I stay in rooms where the problems are hard and the stakes are real.
Outside of work, I'm usually reading, lifting, or tinkering with side projects that have no business plan. I live in Williamsport, PA with my wife.
How I Think
Wide inputs, sharp decisions.
In college I studied Innovation Engineering — a discipline focused on building repeatable pipelines for innovation instead of relying on unstructured brainstorming. That reframed how I approach problems: pull inputs from across industries, users, and data, then structure them into decisions that actually move the product forward.
In practice, that looks like combining competitive analysis with user interviews to reframe a feature request, or using sales call patterns to prioritize a design system update. I care about reaching the best solution given the information available — and I'm willing to put in the work to get there.
Education
Gauntlet AI
Applied AI Engineering
200-hour intensive. Built production AI systems end to end — RAG pipelines, autonomous agents, evals, and a capstone SQL agent shipped from concept to production.
View CertificatePennsylvania College of Technology
B.S. Software Development & Information Management
Minor in Innovation Leadership. 2nd place, Association of Professional Programmers team competition.
Innovation Engineering Institute
Blue Belt Certification — Systematic Innovation
Trained in the fail-fast, fail-cheap innovation methods used by Nike, Disney, and Coca-Cola.