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Celebrating 15 Years
By Jim Garrett
Senior Director, Product Strategy and Planning
April 2025 marked my 15-year anniversary working for HARMAN. It is a major milestone by any measure, and it gave me pause for a bit of reflection on my journey. In early 2010, I came across a job posting for a product manager role in which I would be responsible for brands which I knew and loved and had even sold at retail in the past. At this point in my career, I had a strong resume including retail AV sales and management experience at both mass retail and specialty retail/custom integrator channel companies as well as more than a decade in product development for some of the top audio brands in the industry. I landed the role and set about doing what I love to do. We were a small team at the time and were hungry to grow our business. And that is exactly what we have done in my time with our team.
My current role is Senior Director, Product Strategy and Planning, Luxury Audio. That’s a mighty long title and encompasses a wide range of responsibilities. In short, I am responsible for the general strategic direction and product development for the five brands that live within our business unit. Those include JBL Synthesis, ARCAM, Mark Levinson, and Revel all in their entirety, as well as all component loudspeakers for the JBL brand – a brand that we share with every other business unit within HARMAN. Reporting to me are our product management and industrial design teams who are directly responsible for creating the products we sell. The strategic part of the role is knowing where to go and how to get there and that requires a finger on the pulse of the industry. I have always been an audio geek and I absorb information about brands, products, retailers, suppliers, and every aspect of the audio food chain. I am also a member of the Consumer Technology Association Audio Board where we collectively work towards improving our part of the consumer electronics landscape. Armed with this information and a constant connection to our sales channels, we create roadmaps for the products that fuel our growth.
I enjoy my role as it touches every aspect of our business. It feeds my creative side from the artistic perspective of how a product looks, feels, and operates, and the go-to market and PR parts of the job. It feeds my technical brain as I work with some of the most talented acoustic, electrical and mechanical engineers anywhere in the world. It feeds my logical side with the business metrics including finance and P&L management. And it feeds my curiosity as I am a constant learner and a junkie for all things historical. If you don’t learn from the past, you cannot improve for the future.
As a life-long musician and audio enthusiast, I’m incredibly thankful to have turned my passion and hobbies into a successful career managing legendary audio brands. Since starting my journey with HARMAN, the revenue for our Luxury Audio business unit has tripled and we are on pace to quadruple within the next two years. Our product team has grown to seven very talented people who help bring our visions to life. As a team, we have developed some of the best audio electronics and loudspeakers in the industry and it never ceases to humble me when I see our creations bringing joy to people around the world. Music is a universal language that I speak very well, and it has never wavered in being a faithful companion in my global travels. Fifteen years is a long time to stay at a company these days, but when you work with incredible people united on a common mission with the resources and backing of a company like HARMAN, you can achieve incredible things. I look forward to what the future holds and to continuing to share great sound with everyone that I meet!
