Justine Pratt
From Cocoapedia
Justine Lokanis Pratt (born in Warren, MI, USA) is President/Partner and founder of Creative Algorithms, focusing on mobile software development. She's married to Cory Pratt, with three children. They live and work in the suburbs of Chicago, IL, USA. Her hobbies include reading, gardening, watercolor painting, camping and traveling.
[edit] Biography
Pratt is a Michigan, USA, native. She grew up in Romeo, MI. She was lucky to get early exposure to computers, having written BASIC and Fortran programs (on paper) in high school before personal computers were inexpensive enough for the school to purchase. Their first home computer was a Commodore 64, which {shudder} is now exhibited in museums.
She has a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, where she was very active. She was the Ad Production Manager for the school newspaper and was also the founding president of a local women's fraternity. She also learned German at Michigan Tech.
Pratt has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Oakland University, Rochester, MI, with a concentration in International Business. This degree has proved invaluable in the business management of their company (her primary role).
She chose mechanical engineering because she was interested in math and science and wanted to study something that wasn't abstract; that had a job associated with it. She choose Michigan Tech because it was a smaller engineering school, but had an excellent reputation. The location was attractive--small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP), rural, beautiful, and lots of snow. Plus, since she was valedictorian of her high school graduating class, MTU offered her a full tuition scholarship.
After graduating, she started work in the automotive industry, like many Michigan engineers. She started at Takata, Inc., a privately held company, working on design of passenger side airbags. She remembers having both an IBM-clone (pre Windows) and a Mac to work on. She learned Word and Excel on the Mac and after Windows was released, remembers trying out a little program called Microsoft Project. As she moved up in the company, she became interested in test engineering and quality and started a new department from scratch (Product Assurance Engineering) and implemented ISO 9000.
From Takata, she moved to TRW Vehicle Safety Systems as a Senior Program Manager, staying with safety, but switching to seat belt engineering. She was in charge of multi-million dollar seat belt programs for Ford truck platforms. Later, she managed international cross-customer product launches, with locations in the US, Mexico, Italy, Austria, and Poland. She also started her MBA course-work. She remembers that no one was really using email yet and the world wide web had not yet caught on. She got her first cell phone, since she did a lot of traveling and attending of weekly off site meetings at her customer. Program Management at TRW was very broad, with responsibilities ranging from financial, to timing, to engineering, to team management, to customer relations, to manufacturing. It was very exciting and rewarding, plus how she first started to move away from engineering to more of a business management role. She also got her first PDA while at TRW--a Palm III.
She left TRW and moved to Chicago, where she became Quality Manager for a plant owned by Federal Mogul. She was looking for operations experience (which many mentors advised). The plant produced fog lamps, mainly for General Motors. She remembers the start of supplier websites--where you could get information and interact with your customers online. It was slow and difficult to use, but definitely a step in the right direction. It certainly improved communication.
After FMO, she took a few years off and spent time with her young children, but then she and her husband, Cory, founded Creative Algorithms in 2003, writing software for the then-hot Palm-powered PDA's and Treo smartphones. They've since branched out to other mobile platforms, including the iPhone/iOS. The iOS development has given her a great opportunity to expand her creative side, branching out from the business management role in Creative Algorithms to the main UI/UX and graphics designer in the partnership.
[edit] External links
- Blog
- @justinepratt on Twitter
