Aaron Whittemore is a business & product leader whose career spans the public & private sector, delivering hardtech solutions that matter for customers, technologists, taxpayers, and busy consumers on the move. He currently serves as the General Manager of Mobility at Humatics, a software startup that leverages precise positioning to enable operational efficiencies for corporate & government clients.
Aaron grew up in the Boston area alongside a brother and a sister. His dad was a college administrator who helped ensure that his undergraduate studies were covered. Aaron’s mom worked from an early age, with an extremely strong work ethic, as a teachers aide and stressed the importance of education. Both taught him how to be kind, approachable, responsive, and most importantly a good person.
He studied Computer Engineering at Wentworth and then was granted a full scholarship to continue his studies at the University of Florida where he pursued a Masters in Electrical Engineering, working as a Teaching Assistant. After receiving his Masters’ he was ready to scratch the itch of learning how companies work.
Raytheon offered a two year rotational program to experience different business units across their various offices. He started in an Engineering role but also had “mini MBA” learning sessions every couple months where he learned about Procurement, Finance, Supply Chain, HR, and how a large corporation works.
During his first rotation, he learned what mentorship meant when a 65 year old Raytheon veteran, Thomas Soderberg, took him under his wing. Under Thomas’ guidance Aaron learned to filter what was important, the quality of the work that was needed to succeed, and how to think about using learning as a career compass to help guide him through his career and to always keep a customer first mentality.
As he moved through the leadership program, working on a small piece (circuit boards) of a huge complex system, he wanted to have a broader impact into learning how the overall system worked from an architectural perspective. Using learning as a compass, he became a Senior Product Manager over his 7+ years at Raytheon, working with leaders like Joe Sobchuk who taught him how to shield teams from failure and delegate success for the well executed output of a team’s work product.
Aaron mastered the design, building, development, and manufacturing sections of the defense product management cycle. And then it was time to look outside of the defense sector. He applied and was accepted to Harvard Business School. At HBS he interned at TripAdvisor, which does not make the Patriot missile defense system but can guide you to some cool vacation experiences, learning how a consumer software company operates.
Through one of his classes, he co-founded a startup called ONEE with Michele Choi & Allison Lyness. They built a wearable bracelet to help prevent sexual assault on campuses. The team built an app, entered pitch competitions, and sought early stage funding opportunities to experience the early stage startup launch process. As the CTO, Aaron was responsible for product development at the intersection of hardware & software.
Aaron also spent time interning for the Tampa Bay Rays in Baseball Operations to experience working in the business of sports. He helped the organization evaluate wearables & software products to gain better insight into athlete performance. As Aaron prepared to leave Harvard, he thought it could be cool and unique to do something now that he might not have the opportunity to do further down the line.
Exploring their Leadership Fellows program, which paired students with a non-profit / government entity at the highest levels of the organization, he found an opportunity with the MBTA. He jumped at the chance to get into the belly of the beast, learning the inner workings of something so important & critical to the local economy and..in need of some improvements.
Aaron partnered with General Manager Brian Shortsleeve, a fellow HBS graduate, who was appointed by the Governor to usher in some change. Aaron became an internal consultant, working cross functionally to fight different fires and help with projects across labor relations, engineering, maintenance, HR, and an overall $2B operating and $7B capital budget. He learned a ton and leveraged his engineering background to specifically help with maintenance & engineering projects and drive impact.
Signal modernization, bus facilities & depot updates, and evaluating longer term EV investments were some of the other initiatives he helped lead. But one of the challenges of working in the public sector was personnel turnover. The MBTA cycled through 3 GMs in almost 2 years and objectives shifted as leadership changed.
Aaron learned that there are multi-billion efforts like the “Green Line extension” that get plenty of press but there is just as large of a need to make the trains run on the existing infrastructure, disconnected from the budget machinations. His MBTA experience reinforced his enjoyment for work that had a visible impact on his community and the world around him. But Aaron was ready to try his hand at a growing private sector startup.
Racing toward an IPO, Toast was in their hyper growth phase. Aaron joined the team as a Hardware Product Manager, owning their POS system at restaurants. But just 6 months later, Aaron was recruited to Humatics who was bidding for a multi-million dollar contract with New York’s MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority).
At the MBTA, Aaron had owned the “innovation proposal policy” to solicit proposals from outside technology vendors that would help modernize the agency and came across Humatics while evaluating technologies. Humatics was building an innovative solution to provide innovative train positioning in tunnels without GPS and reached out to Aaron to learn about the transit world and eventually offered him a job. Aaron joined as their Director of Product Management to deploy their technology for the first time with a public agency.
During his 4+ years at Humatics, they have worked with blue chip partners like Siemens, the MTA, Hitachi, Thales, and identified new products that reflected tightening budgets through Covid. Aaron & the Humatics team install IoT sensors for track condition monitoring to help customers audit track infrastructure for quality as the vehicle(s) move to better understand how everything is working. Their software helps predict and prevent incidents that could lead to service disruptions through a combination of sensors and software.
Aaron has enjoyed the journey at Humatics, growing to a senior executive within the organization, maneuvering through its peaks & valleys, to build innovative sensor data into a SaaS platform in a crossover market with a really tight and incredibly smart team. They’re solving an important problem that leverages his private & public sector experience. As an operator, he’s grown by being a key member of the executive team managing their strategy from a prioritization, operations & investment perspective while wearing multiple hats in product, corporate development, marketing, and sales.
Learning As A Mechanism
Throughout his career, Aaron has used learning as a mechanism to make sure he’s on the right path. He recalls that there have been times where he senses that his learning curve has flattened or he’s had to reflect if his role is aligned with problems he wants to be solving.
One example that stands out was when he went to Toast. The company was growing rapidly and he had a really cool role helping them put better hardware products into their restaurants. But he was approached with a unique opportunity to leverage his skillset that let him draw a direct line between the impact he’d had with the MBTA and the impact he could have (and they needed) at Humatics with their upcoming work with the MTA.
Leveraging personal reflection, leaning into his expertise, and evaluating the areas he has historically been most passionate have been a helpful compass to guide him to deep, interesting problems that allow him to learn more about products, prices & markets to continue to grow in new ways.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Cash is King – “Cash is the bloodline of a startup. You might not realize it when you raise a round, but you have to use it sparingly and know when to grow. Don’t grow too fast without a strategy to offset the operational costs because growth means more expense too!”
Alignment Up & Down – “Making sure we’re aligned on the vision of what we need to do to execute on a specific strategy together is important. Sometimes an investor set might not understand a specific market subset either so, to avoid friction that could cause headaches down the line, make sure proper expectations are being set”
Be Super Focused – “ If you can focus your energy on something specific and minimize distractions, that is critical to nail first before adding new features, exploring new markets, or expanding to new products”
As Aaron reflects on the future, he’s started to think about how he wants to be remembered by those who worked for and with him. He believes it’s about the impact he wants to have on their careers and continuing to emulate the leaders he’s had the pleasure to work alongside. One day, he aspires to lead a business as a CEO, optimizing for maximum impact, growing a company and team with a customer first mentality. Aaron also aspires to collaborate more actively with fellow Boston operators in the quarters ahead, swapping stories on learnings, challenges & failures to collectively grow together.
If you’d like to learn more about Aaron, you can find him in a subway tunnel in New York scaling the Mobility business at Humatics, using learning as a mechanism, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, products, and impact you have at Humatics and startups beyond in the years ahead!