Meet the Team: Josh Stern, Sr. Manager of Business Operations

No one understands the value of incremental progress like Josh Stern, Engine’s Senior Manager of Business Operations. That’s because, over his four-year tenure, he’s witnessed what all those individual checked-off tasks add up to: a complete transformation of the company and the accomplishment of every major milestone along the way.

Josh may operate largely behind the scenes, but every team at Engine has felt the impact of his work.

Learn more about how this avid outdoorsman spends his days supporting all aspects of the organization, while maintaining a laser focus on the end goal: delivering the best possible product to our customers!

Tell us about your role! What do you do at Engine?

I manage our Salesforce instance and do some business operations work. I help our strategic teams — our go-to-market teams, like our customer support teams, sales teams, supply teams — to operate as efficiently as possible and to maximize their days. I’m heavily focused on building out automation and the tools that allow our teams to succeed.

You support a lot of teams and tons of different projects. How do you stay organized?

I run off of Asana boards and have pretty regimented practices when it comes to project management. I like to see what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by. When I’m able to complete a task, it’s the best feeling — when you can just mark that completed button, ship it and see it in the wild.

What do you love about your role?

I love that there’s never a dull day. There are always new things to learn, always new teams to interact with. I get to interact with some really awesome folks here. I’ve had the chance to learn so much about systems and tools. It’s really an exciting job and I’m thankful for it, every morning that I wake up and get to do it.

What special skills do you bring to your team?

I don’t know if I necessarily bring special skills; I think I have a really talented team and a talented group of peers that I get to work with. But I think one thing I do bring is tenacity, and my drive to get things done. I’m very oriented toward completion, toward project work, so I always love to see deadlines hit or exceeded. I bring that drive to say, “How do we get this across the finish line?” and “How do we ensure that we don’t allow perfection to get in the way of progress?”

In the four years that you’ve been with Engine, what’s changed and what’s stayed the same?

I would say that very little has stayed the same, which is a good thing. We’re constantly making our tools better; we’re constantly making everything better.

For example, when I first started here, it used to take 15 seconds to search for a hotel on the platform. We’ve got that down to just a few seconds now. It’s really cool to see, especially knowing all the back-end work that went into it, being part of it and getting to see all the incremental progress that went into making it happen.

What makes you most excited about the future with Engine?

The opportunities before us, and how far we’ve come. Starting out here when there were roughly 40 of us — we were doing the best we could, but we weren’t making nearly the impact that we are today.

All the people we’ve brought on are so smart, and I’ve had wonderful opportunities to learn from them all. I think we’re starting to put all these puzzle pieces together, and the future’s bright.

What’s a favorite memory you have from your time with Engine?

One of the coolest things I’ve gotten to see is how we transitioned to a remote-first workplace and how we’ve kept the culture. We had a really cool culture when we were in the office — everyone got along and there was an open-door policy. We’ve maintained that in a remote-first workplace, it’s something a lot of companies have struggled with.

What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of work?

I’m a typical Coloradan. I love to go hiking, to snowboard in the winter. I grew up playing tennis a lot, so I love to do that with my fiancé now. There’s nothing better to me than a nice Saturday spent in the park reading a book. I love to read, love to learn.

Tell us a fun fact about you.

After college, I spent a year living in Germany. I was supposed to be studying — didn’t get as much studying done as I wanted to, but I learned to speak and read fluent German. I’ve written a few papers in German as well.

What is your favorite travel destination?

I really love going to Napa wine country. Outside of that, Prague is such a cool place. I’d highly recommend it.