About Us

Products People Care About was founded by James Gardner in April 2021.

In this page, James explains in his own words how he came to start the business.

Hello! I'm actually best known for my software engineering and for the last nearly 5 years I worked at one of London's leading startup accelerators as a virtual CTO, leading the technology side of the startups on our programmes until they got investment to hire a permanent CTO. Some of those founders are now millionaires (on paper at least).

More often that not I found that the problems these early stage startups faced were nothing to do with their technology choices. They always stemmed from whether people really cared about their products, or not!

Sometimes they'd be trying to build products that it was clear their main customer actively would not want to exist, much less building one that they cared about, or even just wanted or needed.

I'd used a set of tools and workshops from my time as a Consultant previously, so I introduced these to the accelerator programme, and together with my colleague Paul Nebel, we refined them into a set of workshops that would help the CEOs really focus on delivering something unique that solved a problem their customers really cared about.

These workshops got the attention of the wider organisation and towards the end of my time at the accelerator programme we were spending as much time running them for multi-million pound internal projects as for our startups.

I'm lucky enough that people often come to me for advice about the technology they are using for their products. But today I'm able to sit nicely between the business people and the engineers, helping both understand each other and helping both decide what experiments to run and what actions to take to help build products people care about.

We're looking to work with clients that are keen to invest £825 per day to work with us to explore and develop their business model. That exploration will be used to quantify the value of Engineering work that could be done and provide a strong business case for new effort, whether that is to find new customers, create new products, solve scaling problems or more effectively support or upsell to existing customers.

Our skill is that we can navigate the questions and workshops that would be most useful to your organisation in your specific circumstances, rather than taking a one size fits all approach or expecting you to learn how to see and solve any problems yourselves.

We want to help move any root problems forward and help you make your business sound and better able to achieve its aims.

So that's the offer. You might come to us to help with your engineering but we'd like to do that by helping you understand what's of most value to your customer, which practices could improve your current processes, what is costing your engineering team the most time and therefore what you should do to build a product your customers care about.

The reason we're called Products People Care About rather than Products Customers Care About is that we believe charities, businesses and other organisations all have a greater responsibility than the profit motive. We want to be part of the creation of products that help increase social justice and reduce the impact on our biodiversity and ecosystems, something we believe the vast majority of people really do care about.