I’m Jeff.
and, I’ve been a product / UX designer since 2006.
A Northern California native, I grew up over the hill from wine country. In 2006, luckless after 13-months trying to find design work in the Bay Area, I made the cross-country move to New York City. Six weeks later, I landed my first job at Social Sauce, a start-up travel-social network (now resigned to the pantheon of defunct start-ups).
Since then, I’ve used design thinking and process to solve problems for every imaginable type of company and organization: technology, incubator products, universities, non-profits, entertainment/media; from local orgs to Fortune 100/500 companies with global footprints. I’m seasoned and proud of it (Will Riker 🧔🏻♂️)!
My first website was a Geocities tribute website to Croatian professional tennis player Goran Ivanisevic, I called it the JaMaL Xone (get it? 🙃).
One day in 1996, while shopping at Costco, I found a $29 CD-ROM program called Sierra Web Designer — a W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. web design program that designed, coded and uploaded directly to Geocities — and asked my mom to buy it for me. Thank you, Mom!
I’ve worn many hats throughout my career, but have focused in on UX/product design and strategy since 2012.
I believe my experience having been a fullstack/multi-disciplinary creative has helped build bridges, I love collaborating and working with everyone, from devs, to PMs, to executive stakeholders.
My first design job was during undergrad. I worked for U.C. Davis’ Information & Educational Technology (I.E.T.) department’s marketing office.
We handled campus-wide physical and digital communications for everything technology related: computer labs, student intranet accounts, we even designed some cornball ads for the university’s busses. GO AGGIES!
My creative methodology
01
Align design with business goals
Ensure that the design strategy and approach provides value to both the business and the user.
02
Foster a culture of innovation
Make sure that my team members have the freedom to explore and to challenge their creativity, always in service of self-sustained improvement.
03
Drive user-centric solutions
Embrace empathy, user inputs and feedback so that our solutions meet or exceed user needs.
04
Team management
Set clear goals, being a mentor and guide for the team to successfully realize design strategy
05
Facilitate cross-functional collaboration
Ensure design considerations are integrated into all aspects of product development
How I lead
I’ve led teams a small as 3 and as large as 50, inclusive of UX, UI/creative and product management disciplines. My leadership style centers on empowering teams to do their best work through creativity, experimentation, shared knowledge and collaboration:
Be the guide, be the glue.
I want every person I work with to have confidence in my capability to keep the team moving towards progress, and to understand that I am there as an information resource, a creative lens and many times, a facilitator.
Cultivate the forest.
My favorite takeaway from my time working with start-ups, “seeing the 10,000ft view”, to not get “lost in the trees”. It it critically important for me to maintain perspective and awareness at all levels of solutioning.
Collaboration. Facilitiation.
Passionate designers individually come with equally passionate perspectives. At the outset of any projects, one ground rule I set is that there is multiple ways to creatively solve a problem. We learn from each other to solution from all angles, and together, deliver amazing experiences.
Empathy.
Empathy is our greatest superpower, it not only in solving for our end user, but in also recognizing each team members strengths and passions. Building healthy relationships with everyone I work with is one of my biggest priorities.
Not Not Working
Scenes from a life well explored.
