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Carnegie Mellon · School of Design · 2026

Senior Director, Head of Product Design.
Where design is going when people and agents ship together.

About me

Family Man. Designer. Builder.

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Professional journey

21 YEARS IN DESIGN.

I’ve been shaped as both a designer and design leader by startups, agencies, and large enterprises, each one changing how I think about craft, product, and teams.

15 yrsAs an IC
6 yrsLeading design
What drives me

LEARNING, GROWING, FIGURING IT OUT.

“I genuinely enjoy the process of learning, growing, and figuring things out. The greatest reward is seeing where that journey takes us and the opportunities it creates for all of us.”
Giving back
  • Uncommon
  • Carnegie Mellon School of Design
  • Avocademy
  • Flatiron School
  • KCC Design Works
Personal journey

DAD & PARTNER.

Born in Terre Haute, IN. I grew up in Durango, CO and currently live just outside of Denver, CO.

  • Family group selfie under autumn trees
  • On a giant redwood stump
  • Family at an alpine lake below snowy peaks
  • Selfie among the redwoods
  • Family selfie under a glass atrium
  • Kids on a fallen log in a forest
  • Family selfie indoors
  • Family selfie in the snowy mountains
  • Family at a theme park
Hobbies / Art & pop culture

ART & POP CULTURE.

  • Framed spray-paint print of a pink one-eyed ice cream character
  • Colorful pop-art print of cartoon rockets and characters in a teal frame
  • Print of a bearded figure hiding behind a saguaro cactus
  • Linocut postcard of jagged mountains over a vintage postmark
  • Typographic poster of U.S. national park names
  • Framed painting of an owl perched over a desert landscape
  • Geometric multicolor bear head print
  • Illustrated bouquet of flowers and musical instruments
  • Neon green and black abstract screen print
  • Shelf with design books and a vinyl spray-can art toy
Hobbies / TV & cinema

TV & CINEMA.

  • Top Chef poster
  • Next Level Chef poster
  • Chopped poster
  • Widow's Bay poster
  • Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc poster
  • Jujutsu Kaisen poster
  • Solo Leveling poster
  • Backrooms poster
  • Hocus Pocus poster
  • National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation poster
Hobbies / Easy reading

EASY READING.

  • Dungeon Crawler Carl poster: Carl walking toward a stone archway
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl poster: Carl holding a lantern in a tunnel
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl poster: Princess Donut on a pedestal
Hobbies / AI: nights & weekends

AI: NIGHTS & WEEKENDS.

  • LawnCare.center
  • Hermes
  • TechMeetups.io
Recent focus / Personal software

HOMEBASE.

A Grok bot and project context feed an Obsidian vault; Homebase turns it into my personal software.

Recent focus / Personal software

HOMEBASE.

  • Homebase home screen: greeting, site and spend stats, recently active repos, search and analytics panels
  • Homebase Saved view: bookmarks tagged topic/design, pulled by a Dataview query from Obsidian
  • Homebase Skills view: a grid of Frontend Design & Motion skill notes
  • Homebase digest: bookmark ideas from the week, grouped by active project
NextResearch to Decisions

Understand the customer, find the friction, and make an educated choice.

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Product ideas / Customer requests

THE SIGNALS.
THEN THE DECISION.

Product idea PIM-6345: How to temporarily give app permissions, from EKOTECHS
Product idea PIM-16352: Custom role, from Tamara FZ LLC
Product idea PIM-13545: Local admin requests via Slack, from Hyper Luminal Games
ICP, sentiment & product analytics

INTERNAL DATA
& INPUTS.

Enterprise ICP research profile
Customer sentiment themes by mention volume
Pendo funnel drop-off analysis
  • Gong
  • Snowflake
  • Pendo
Review sites / Six platforms

EXTERNAL
FEEDBACK.

The sentiment in three buckets: what they love, what frustrates, what they request
Top themes by mention volume: ease of use 879 praises, missing features 381 gripes
Rating across platforms, normalized 4.0 to 4.6 across Gartner, Capterra, Software Advice, PeerSpot, G2, TrustRadius
IT admin surveys / AI at work

USER
SURVEYS.

Survey question 8: whether AI use is officially sanctioned; most respondents have an approved list or loosely governed use
Survey question 12: whether AI has made admins more productive at work; strong agreement dominates
Survey question 7: what IT admins use AI for at work, led by writing and docs, troubleshooting, and researching products
Recorded calls / Voice of the customer

CUSTOMER
CONVERSATIONS.

A customer interview reviewed in Gong: the transcript, call recording, and per-speaker talk-time timeline for a conversation about the macOS lockout and password-reset workflow
Dynamic personas

PERSONAS AS
REVIEWERS.

Market landscape / Competitors & inspiration

COMPETITOR &
INDUSTRY RESEARCH.

Competitors

  • Active Directory
  • Okta
  • NinjaOne
  • Hexnode
  • Atera

Industry

  • Mobbin
  • Refero
NextHow We Build Today

A new PDLC where design, product, and engineering ship from the same prototypes.

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YOU HAVE AN IDEA FOR A CONCEPT.

It all starts with a rough idea or concept. From there you’ll create a PRD and attach it to a Jira ticket. Bring the Jira ticket into your IDE and it will begin building based on Circuit components, patterns, and page layouts.

  • PRD Creation
  • Jira
  • IDE

SOCIALIZING YOUR PROTOTYPE.

You’ve made enough progress on the concept and you want to share it out for an upcoming exec meeting, design review, or formal research study. Deploying to AWS is simple, and automatically puts the concept behind our company login. Only accessible for enabled customers, or internal employees.

  • Secure
  • Research ready
  • Exec & SME friendly

AI MODERATED RESEARCH.

Drop a prototype into a Userology study, let AI moderate the session, and get a synthesized read by end of day.

PLANNING.

We have a confident view of the scope and level of effort associated with the initiative. Design starts to break apart the UI into components that Eng will implement and integrate the business logic. We’re also defining release milestones and GTM activities.

  • UX Final
  • Timelines Final
  • Componentization for Eng

TECH WRITING AGENT.

Covers the majority of our distinct component types — toasts, error messages, buttons, empty states, dialogs, modals, tooltips, placeholders, links, dropdowns, switches, radio buttons, status cards, etc. — each with its own dedicated reference file containing formulas and examples.

  • Voice & tone
  • Copy formulas
  • Reference files

EXECUTION.

Design supports a mix of manual and automated tests and UI refinement.

  • Internal Preview
  • Bug Smash

GTM.

Based on the launch type (Major, Minor, Critical) we’ll create and provide GTM materials for web pages, help documentation, and social channels. The project already holds the context: the PRD, the Jira epic, the prototype and the release notes. A docs agent turns that into the Knowledge Base article, ready for review.

  • GTM Artifacts
  • Documentation
NextJC Internal Agents

Agents that run on a schedule or trigger.

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Case study · JumpCloud

AGENTIC WORKFLOWS TO SUPPORT IT ADMINS.

Agents that run on a schedule or trigger.

Role
Sr. Director, Head of Product Design
Year
2026
Team
Platform Experience
JumpCloud Agents: the User Offboarding Automation agent, with its details, schedule and triggers, permissions, bindings, execution and results beside a workflow preview that ends in Email, Jira and Slack.
Case study / JumpCloud agents

TODAY THE ASSISTANT ANSWERS.

Today the assistant answers. Ask for your users in a plain sentence and it runs the query, returns the table, and stops there. Everything past that — acting on a schedule, acting before anyone asks — is what we set out to design.

The JumpCloud AI Assistant home screen — a conversational front door with shortcuts to manage users, devices, applications and policies, and view audits and system events.
AI Assistant home: a conversational front door for managing users, devices, apps, and audits.
Case study / JumpCloud agents

ASK IN PLAIN LANGUAGE.

The AI Assistant running a List Users query in a chat, returning a table of users with email, username, state, and active status.
Ask in plain language and the assistant runs the query. Here it lists users with their state and status.
Case study / JumpCloud agents

ADMIN BOT & AGENT FLOWS.

Two patterns, one platform. The Admin Bot takes a prompt and fans it out — Identity, Devices, SaaS Management, Reporting, Policy — each agent adding its vertical context before they converge on a single action. The JumpCloud Agent inverts it and runs on a trigger or a schedule instead of a prompt. It pulls a resource, acts, reports out to Slack, Jira, or email, and writes every run to an activity log.

Admin Bot flow — an existing bot takes a user prompt, fans it out to Identity, Devices, SaaS Management, Reporting, and Policy agents, each adding vertical context before converging on a single action and response.
JumpCloud Agent flow — a new agent runs on a trigger or schedule, pulls a resource and vertical context into an action, sends outputs to Slack, Jira, and Email, and writes every run to Agent Activity logs.
Two agentic patterns: the existing Admin Bot (left) and the new JumpCloud Agent (right).
AI-readiness research

CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS.

Feedback on the Admin Bot release was very positive, so we were fairly sure our IT admins would also want extended agentic capabilities. To check that assumption, I led moderated customer interviews and used our research platform Optimal to send a 100-person survey to IT professionals who don’t use JumpCloud. Moderated sessions with admins, recorded and reviewed in Gong. The macOS lockout and password-reset workflow came up on its own.

A customer interview reviewed in Gong — the transcript, call recording, and per-speaker talk-time timeline for a conversation about the macOS lockout and password-reset workflow.
Customer interviews reviewed in Gong: transcript, recording, and speaker timeline for each call.
AI-readiness research

IT ADMIN SURVEY.

A hundred IT professionals, none of them JumpCloud customers. They already use AI for writing and docs, troubleshooting, and product research. Most work somewhere with an approved list or no real policy at all. Sentiment skews positive and they say it has made them more productive.

Survey question 7 — what IT admins use AI for at work, with writing and docs, troubleshooting, and researching products leading adoption.
Survey question 8 — whether AI use is officially sanctioned; most respondents have an approved list or loosely governed use.
Survey question 11 — how admins feel about AI being everywhere; sentiment skews positive to very positive.
Survey question 12 — whether AI has made admins more productive at work; strong agreement dominates.
Q7 what admins use AI for · Q8 whether AI use is sanctioned · Q11 how admins feel about AI everywhere · Q12 whether AI made them more productive (IT-admin survey, 100 respondents).
Case study / JumpCloud agents

CREATE THE CONCEPT.

Layout explorations for the Create Agent flow. The variations test how much structure the concept needs, from a full card layout down to a single natural-language prompt.

Create Agent layout exploration — a Cards variation with Details, Permissions, Bindings, and Schedule panels beside Execution and Results.
Create Agent layout exploration — a stepped Wizard variation moving through Details, Permissions, Bindings, Schedule, Execution, and Review.
Create Agent layout exploration — a Prompt variation where the admin describes the agent in natural language and the system generates a configuration.
Create Agent layout exploration — a Compact variation with collapsed accordion sections for optional configuration.
Cards and a stepped Wizard (top); a natural-language Prompt and a Compact accordion (bottom).
Case study / JumpCloud agents

DESIGN → ENGINEERING HANDOFF.

In Storybook’s left panel, the project is broken into consumable pieces for engineering. Engineers pull directly from this GitHub branch and build from those pieces.

The JumpCloud Agents view built in Storybook against the Circuit design system — a data table of registered agents with type, SPIFFE ID, status, owner, and last-seen columns.
The Agents view built in Storybook against the Circuit design system, handed to engineering as living, documented stories.
Case study / JumpCloud agents

FINISHED PRODUCT.

Create an agent, set its triggers and schedule, review what it did.

Alternate approach · the same case study cut as a 23-second release video, generated from the study’s own copy, screens and walkthrough.
NextThe Future

It’s a great time to be a designer!

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Soleio · @soleio

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO
DESIGNERS WHO BUILD.

Soleio on X: The future belongs to designers who build, quoting Adrián Mato’s launch of an 80s-inspired notes app written in Rust.
First of Kind, season 3 episode 1 with Guillermo Rauch: One Stroke Dragon. Opens the episode on YouTube.
Left: Soleio’s post. Right: First of Kind S03 / E01, Guillermo Rauch, “One Stroke Dragon” · click to watch on YouTube.
Grok Bot Templates · x.ai

CONVERSATIONAL &
AGENTIC FLOWS.

The two Grok Bot listings side by side over a hazy projected sky: LawnCare Center with a green blob mascot, and BuildFeed: Startups with a white orb mascot, each with an Add to Grok Bot button.
Design systems · Circuit DS

DESIGN SYSTEMS.

Circuit DS primitive color palettes
Circuit DS components: buttons, tabs, toggles, table
Circuit DS rules file: markdown AI guidance

UNDERSTAND THE
FOUNDATIONS.

refero
NextThank you
Questions & discussion

Jake Taylor · Senior Director, Head of Product Design

linkedin.com/in/thejaketaylor

Resources · Everything to keep you building · 1 / 3

RESOURCES.

Component libraries

Motion-forward collections

Resources · Everything to keep you building · 2 / 3

RESOURCES.

Motion libraries

Interactive libraries

Resources · Everything to keep you building · 3 / 3

RESOURCES.

Design inspiration

Prompt library