Resume / CV


jase@hey.com • +1 847-274-5532 •
622 Edinburgh Lane, West Dundee, IL 60118 USA
LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jasemiller
Websitejase.is
Portfoliojase.is/work

I’m a poet, designer, and product leader collaborating for a better future.

Words deeply impact our ability to connect and align strategically with each other. Strategy requires design—and in all its forms design is simply creativity in the service of intention. As a leader I collaborate intentionally and holistically to create innovative solutions where humanity and technology intersect.

My career weaves together words, images, and actions to craft better teams, organizations, solutions, products and experiences.

My strengths align well with roles in UX, UI, design systems, and communication design, product management, and people management. My ability to break down silos and connect across functions and roles helps me integrate strategies and strengthen platforms. I seek opportunities to stretch so that my influence can have a multiplying effect.


Highlighted Strengths

  • 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.
  • Collaboration and execution. I’ve collaborated with many individuals and teams to align strategy and execution. My hands-on experience in engineering and DevOps, UX design and DesignOps, product management and ProductOps helps me understand different perspectives. Strong communication is key internally and externally. I’m an accomplished public speaker, facilitator, workshop leader, mentor and coach. Whether formally or informally, I regularly serve as coach and mentor to builders—product managers, designers, engineers, and founders.
  • 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. Continuous discovery methods help identify and document ongoing opportunities and solutions to validate and prioritize.
  • Agile Mindset. I’ve excelled at implementing and executing Agile methodologies at multiple fast-paced companies. Each has had a unique flavor because Agile is a mindset more than a set of particular 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 practices with new teams and seen them become autonomous and high-performing. I’ve pioneered unique Product Development Lifecycle frameworks, product documentation templates and practices for aligning and communicating from strategy to launch. I’ve done this for 0-1 products as well as more established products that need significant, iterative improvement.

Experience

Product Manager in Chief, Founder

Wordhammer — (Jan 2024 - present)

  • Applying my expertise to help others through consulting and coaching, I meet with startup founders, company leaders, product managers, designers and others who desire to improve and thrive while they make an impact on the world.
  • Currently mentoring three product managers, two startup founders, and an emerging publishing house leadership team.

Senior Design System Manager

OneTrust — Feb 2024 - Nov 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 support cross-functional platform-wide improvements.

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 new 0→1 solutions for EDR and Compliance
    • more than doubled velocity sprint-over-sprint
    • significantly increased speed of cross-team collaboration and dependency management
    • as a team 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 that 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 an omni-channel communications model and messaging strategy. I initiated partnerships with local universities to oversee and mentor design interns.

Note: Additional work experiences listed on LinkedIn Profile

What others say

Full endorsements available on LinkedIn.

”Jase’s ability to drive success while maintaining strong team dynamics makes him an invaluable asset to any organization.” —Chris Miller, UX designer
“…curious, adaptable, empathetic, and outcome-driven… I’m still referring to his talks and using his written content as templates regularly.” —Michael Tsai, head of product
“I have never been so close to my teammates in my career than when Jase began leading our team and imprinting his way of thinking, working and treating others on us.” —Allan Eivazian, lead engineer
“…unparalleled understanding and execution proficiency …a leader who values the power a strong team culture holds in building high-quality products.” —Bruce Wong, senior engineer
“…a true driver of customer value which enabled our team to consistently deliver features that drove impact with our customer base.” —Rusty Calder, engineering manager
“…empathetic and user-focused… He brings a thoughtful, design-forward approach to every challenge… brings his authentic self to work everyday and works to create an environment where his teammates feel comfortable doing the same. He’s unafraid to take alternative paths towards understanding problems… or evaluating possible solutions.” —WP Roe, director of product
“…set the bar in terms of consistency, quality, and completeness of communication. I would highly recommend Jase...” —Adam Pettit, CEO
“…stellar communication, quick responsiveness, and strategic planningnavigating complexities while maintaining a positive attitude…” —Yumeng Chen, UX designer
“…pursues excellence in all of his work.” —Anna Pavey, COO

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.
  • Award of Excellence for holistic vision (G2, 2019)

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


Highlighted Skills

  • Product Management
  • UX — deep UX knowledge and skills
  • Design Systems
  • System Thinking
  • Product Strategy
  • Product Innovation
  • Collaboration
  • Communication
  • Problem Solving — high comfort with ambiguity and complexity
  • Leadership — including coaching and mentoring
  • 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
  • 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…