JASE MILLER résumé

I’m a poet, designer, product leader, and trail runner who believes in a better future. I believe we have a creative role in crafting that future together.

Our natural world is one of our greatest sources for inspiration, creative possibility, and health—and too many of us are immersed in technologies that distract us from connecting with nature and with each other.

As a hiker, backpacker, and trail runner I’m constantly looking for ways to encourage and empower more people to experience the outdoors.

As a product manager, I empathize, inspire vision, solve problems, and lead teams to deliver value. In collaboration with others I create innovative solutions where humanity and technology intersect.

Highlighted Strengths

• Cross-functional collaboration and execution. I’ve aligned many teams and perspectives across strategy and execution by leveraging my experience in engineering and DevOps, UX design and DesignOps, product management and ProductOps, marketing, sales, customer success, support, and executive leadership. My postgraduate studies and experience in communication, culture, and marketing make me comfortable collaborating with product marketing and launching in appropriate forms—beta, early access, preview, GA. I’m an accomplished public speaker, facilitator, workshop leader, mentor and coach.
• Versatility and innovation. I have a strong growth mindset and learn quickly and constantly. This allows me to be successful across many different problem spaces, teams, and industries. I always look for ways to improve—myself, my teams, and our products. Even as we evolve our product and tactically execute our roadmap, it’s crucial that we spend time observing the “edges” to understand connected industry trends, customer challenges, and opportunities for innovation.
• Actionable insights. The same principles that make great companies make great products—strong principles and values, observable data, trusted and actionable insights, strong foundations and infrastructure for empowered decision-making, high performance, and value. I’ve seen the way good decisions in DevOps, DesignOps, and ProductOps create high performance in organizational systems, and I’ve helped establish and strengthen some of those practices at past companies. I’ve learned a lot from IDEO’s Design Thinking to empathize with customers and seek insights that are hard for them to articulate. Continuous Discovery methods help identify and document ongoing opportunities and solutions that can be prioritized and validated with users.
• Agile Mindset. I’ve excelled at implementing and executing Agile (and particularly Scrum) methodologies at multiple fast-paced companies. Each has had a unique flavor because Agile is a mindset more than a transferable set of practices. I’ve performed all functions of Product Owner and Scrum Master and am comfortable operating at a high level across those practices—wherever necessary for the team to thrive. I’ve established such practices with teams that are just starting out and seen them become autonomous, high-performing teams. I’ve pioneered unique Product Development Lifecycle frameworks, product documentation templates and practices for aligning and communicating from strategy to launch.

Experience

Senior Product Manager, Founder

Wordhammer — Jan 2024 - as available

• Product, design, and leadership consultancy focused on the power of language to shape products, experiences, and cultures.
• Founded in 2024 as a side project to foster innovation during trending tech layoffs.

Senior Design System Manager

OneTrust — Feb 2024 -

• Blended Product Management with UX Management. Built and led a team that evolved a design system as a product that integrated UX Design with UX Content Strategy to create quality, speed, and consistency internally and externally.
• As a Product Manager for our Components engineering team, developed a long-term roadmap, backlog, and Agile practices that focused on delivering internal and external value through our design system.
• Salvaged a major project that impacted more than 90% of our software solutions and 100% of our customers.
• Managed and facilitated product, design, and engineering collaboration across more than 20 software teams, including establishing a contribution model to empower teams to act on behalf of customers.
• Conducted customer research to understand pain points and customer needs to inform design and engineering decisions.
• Collaborated with Marketing and other stakeholders to prepare customer communications, training, and documentation to support enhancements to our products.
• Built governance and software lifecycle processes to coordinate cross-functional efforts.

Senior Product Manager

Kandji — 2.5 years (Aug 2021 - Dec 2023)

• Empowered new team with an Agile mindset and Scrum practices that resulted in consistent and continuous growth into a high-performing team:
  • shifted focus from core platform work to deliver expanding value ($3M+ ARR) outcomes
    • Supported company expansion into Information Security, including EDR and Compliance
  • more than doubled velocity sprint-over-sprint
  • significantly increased speed of cross-team collaboration and dependency management
  • became experts at product discovery (including product research and data analysis), handling ambiguity, trade-offs, pivots in priority, and tackling emerging opportunities
• Leveraged strategic leadership to help form an Agile Guild to champion growth across Research and Development
• Co-founded and provided Product oversight for the Front End Guild to coordinate and implement new design systems across product areas
• Facilitated regular cross-disciplinary “What’s next in product” conversations to surface insights across the company to inform strategic decisions about new product development and create a path to future innovation
• Established a Product Development Lifecycle to help align good process
• Created shared templates for one-pagers and product requirements documents
• Presented company-wide talks to equip and empower teams
• Championed and modeled open communication, flow of information, and accountability through regular stakeholder briefings, meeting notes published to the entire company, and video messages for alignment with executive leadership.

Product Manager

G2 — 2 years (Oct 2019 - Aug 2021)

Led multiple teams across a dual-sided marketplace within a fast-paced Agile environment to achieve outcomes. Collaborated with cross-functional teams and stakeholders with a data-driven, user-focused approach to achieve hyper-growth results through iterative design and development.

• Facilitated dual-sided marketplace discovery to identify and prioritize new product development for global offerings targeting $6M+ ARR in first half
• Built APIs to power integrations that achieved outcomes:
  • More than 10x increase in high-value user generated content
  • More than 50% increase in quality of content
• Co-founded Product Ops team to align and coordinate changes in Agile process across Research and Development functions
• For our core review collection product:
  • Incrementally adjusted UX to improve engagement, quality, and completions
  • Improved performance for significantly faster response times
  • improved data integrity through product lifecycle management of data storage, retrieval, and relationships
  • Integrated data with machine learning for pattern recognition and to generate new insights quickly
  • Experimented with emerging AI to spot fraudulent accounts, eliminate duplication, and triage suspicious activity

UX / UI Designer

G2 — 4 years (Jun 2017 - Aug 2021)

Integrated UX expertise and human centered design with product design and leadership in a fast-moving Agile environment. Inspired by DevOps, I built a Design Ops function, iterating methods and practices to create a collaborative product environment between Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers that emphasized customer experience. Continued to provide design decisions and fill design gaps throughout transition to product management role.

Communications Director and Design Manager

ITEAMS — 7 years (May 2010 - Jun 2017)

As part of a dynamic executive leadership team, I applied an Agile mindset and design thinking to the iterative development of a unique product—community-based transformation. I learned and developed a jazz-style leadership competency, deepened my emotional intelligence and empathy. I collaborated with stakeholders and the leadership team to reinvent a struggling global nonprofit organization of 50 years into an energetic start-up environment. I contributed to the development of vision, structure, branding, design, language, values, recruiting, promotion, and fundraising. I helped develop a leadership track within the organization and led workshops on change management, leadership, and communication (including giving and receiving feedback). I led collaborative strategy, process, design, and full-stack development of multiple software projects, executed high-level event experiences for new investors, traveled internationally with video teams to produce professional story videos to demonstrate impact, designed and implemented a communications model and messaging strategy across multiple channels. I initiated partnerships with local universities to oversee and mentor design interns.

Note: Additional work experiences listed on LinkedIn Profile →

Certifications

• Business Innovation (IDEO)
• Designing Strategy (IDEO)
• UX Certification in Design Management (NN/g)

Awards

• Lightning Award (Kandji, November 2023) — Presented by my Agile team in recognition of team empowerment, strategy, and excellence in product leadership for 2023.

Education

• Master of Arts - MA, Communication and Culture
  Trinity (Aug 1999 - May 2003)
• Bachelor of Arts - BA, English, Creative Writing, Education
  Carthage College (Aug 1994 - May 1998)

Select Publications

• Toward a holistic model for leading change →
• 4 Iterative Practices for Navigating Product Management and Life →
• How to lead teams—and yourself—through ambiguity →

Highlighted Skills

• Product Management
• Product Strategy
• Product Innovation
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Problem Solving — high comfort with ambiguity and complexity
• Leadership
• Design Thinking
• Agile Methodologies / Scrum
• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Public Speaking
• Presentations
• Facilitation
• Product Marketing
• Go-To-Market Strategy
• Stakeholder Communication
• Product Development Lifecycle
• Roadmapping
• Prioritization
• Business Analysis
• Data Analytics — including SQL, Amplitude, Segment, Mixpanel, Pendo, HubSpot, HEX, Snowflake, Metabase (and others)
• Continuous Discovery
• Multivariate Testing
• Customer Research
• UX — deep UX knowledge and skills
• Data Visualization
• Quick learner of tools and methods — e.g. Atlassian (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello), Productboard, Prodpad, Git, GitHub, APIs, Kubernetes, Docker, Ubuntu, HTML, CSS, macOS, Asana, Slack, Sketch, Figma, Figjam, Miro, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Google…