I'm Jeff, a product design leader living in the Hudson Valley. I’ve spent my career shipping impactful products and elevated user experiences that empower customers with the solutions they need to enhance their workflows and better their lives. Currently, I’m the Director of Product Design at Backstage, where I've been for nearly 12 years.
My Role
We were a small, scrappy team when I joined in 2013, so I wore many hats. I was so the only designer for the first few years, so designing was where most of my time was spent (mostly in Sketch back then). We also had no PMs, so I lot of what I did involved tasks pertaining to product management. And, we only had one front-end engineer, so I actually wrote all the CSS.
Luckily, we slowly built a talented product team that ended up being pretty good at developing and shipping products. My role evolved into Senior Product Designer as we hired other designers, and eventually Director of Product Design. Today, my responsibilities in any given week typically look something like this:
I enjoy the diversity of responsibilities, but as a designer at heart, the yellow and purple areas are what excite me the most. Thinking about complex user problems and collaborating on how best to create impactful products to solve them will always be the most enjoyable part of the job.
These days, I spend more time reviewing designs rather than creating them. I love seeing what my designers have come up with, offering feedback and critiques, and challenging them to find the most intuitive solutions, add delight where possible, and always consider how one tool or feature they're working on fits into the end-to-end user journey.
Part of being a manager is also establishing systems, processes, and best practices to help the team make better design decisions. These sorts of things not only serve as guidance for designers, but ensure the our platform feels cohesive, connected, and designed to provide a seamless, engaging experience to our users.
A note about this portfolio
I've been at Backstage for the majority of my career in product design, so what you'll see here is work highlighted from that platform. I've broken it up into three sections focused on products for each of our user types. There are so many different tools and features I could delve into, but I’ve tried to limit it to the products that solve some of the biggest problems and needs in their day-to-day workflows.
Instead of focusing on the entire process (do you really need to see photos of Post-it notes on a whiteboard?), as a design leader I think it's more valuable to talk about the thinking behind a product—the problem it's meant to solve or need it's designed to meet—and then share some results we've seen and how we gauge success.
For all of these products and features, my involvement spanned the entire end-to-end design process, from ideation and user research to reviewing and signing off on the final designs. Most of the actual UI design you'll see was done in Figma by the designers on my team, and as always, hats off to them for their great work.