Jared Zimmerman

Jared Zimmerman

Design Leader in San Francisco, CA, he/him

About

Hi, I’m Jared and I help product people make the best mistakes of their careers. I enable humans to enable machines to be more human. The best way to do that is by identifying problems before they emerge and finding solutions. The biggest opportunities come from the biggest problems.

A lot of us feel terrified to make mistakes at work. We worry about upsetting leadership or losing jobs. I encourage mistakes. My passion is building and growing amazing teams who are encouraged to attempt the impossible, solve the unknowable, and fearlessly fail. For success in designing in the AI space, you must consider worst case scenarios, working toward descriptive outcomes, rather than prescriptive solutions. With better foresight and agility, we save time, money and team frustration.

Unraveling mysteries, conceptualizing solutions, and implementing concrete outcomes that expand human potential drive me to build curious, daring teams of designers able to inspire, execute, and teach about the application of next generation technologies.

Work Experience

2021 — 2023
San Francisco, CA

Leading international, multi-location hybrid teams to advance current and future products through user-centric, AI powered product design. The team works across mobile surfaces as well as next generation VR, AR, and XR surfaces for the metaverse. Leveraging AI first design, research, and software engineering, with a focus on Commerce, Ad creation and display, Relevance & Ranking systems, Integrity and user safety product areas. Working with Product teams across Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Horizon, Oculus, Portal, Ads Manager, etc) to support, augment, and accelerate the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in products, while ensuring these technologies are used in responsible and respectful way, keeping user education and understand at the forefront.

2020 — 2021
Berlin, Germany

Delivery Hero is the world’s leading local delivery platform, operating its service in over 40 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Defined over a dozen new user facing metrics to gauge long-term product success. Grew and mentored over 50 diverse, multinational, cross-functional designers, researchers, and design managers. Lead marketing and product teams to develop new design processes focused on active user involvement. Originated new hiring rubric and interview process. Fostered a team environment promoting learning, exploration, and innovation.

Overall, I accelerated Delivery Hero’s product development process with large scale data analysis and new user experience-centric measurements.

2017 — 2020
Mountain View, CA

My global team of over 45 UX designers, senior leads, and managers define and design products and systems for structured search verticals, events, image, video, as well as user-generated content and publishing platforms across Google Search Desktop and Mobile products.

2015 — 2017
Mountian View, CA

Leading, managing, and inspiring designers to imagine and create the next generation of natural interactions with technology, through conversation, speech, and pervasive proactive assistance.

Voice UX designs and shares best practices, patterns, and creates tools for conversational interfaces. Through personality, spoken voice, personalization, and discoverability the team mediates the relationship between the user and the Google Assistant.

The team works across all platforms and form factors to create delightful, appropriate, accessible experiences for users.

2013 — 2015
San Francisco, CA

Wikimedia Foundation is a global nonprofit dedicated to encouraging growth and development of free-content, multilingual, wiki-based projects, including Wikipedia, with over 500 million monthly users and over 200 employees.

As the Director of User Experience, I led, trained, and mentored team a of 16 including Senior UX Designers and Design Research Lead Manager; reported to the SVP Product, Deputy Director. Planned and managed $1.4 million annual budget. Conceptualized, developed, and executed quarterly and annual roadmaps. Partner with other directors in Product and Engineering disciplines to establish processes and products for both the foundation and its employees.

Assembled and grew team of top-talent designers from 2 to 14 across all design and research discipline areas, with zero attrition in staff. Built exceptional trust and loyalty by empowering them to take ownership of projects, pushing them to reach their highest potential, and serving as a collaborator rather than simply a manager.

Built Research Design team within the group to create user-driven software with continual validation and user needs focus during the product development process.

2009 — 2013
San Francisco, CA

Autodesk is a multinational developer of software for multiple industries, including flagship AutoCAD products and platform.

Initially hired as a contract employee to lead small team in development and release of new AutoCAD for Mac; subsequently hired full-time based on contract work performance. Oversaw team of 6 and reported to Sr. UX Director; managed the full cycle of multiple design projects.

Spearheaded release of AutoCAD for Mac that became highly praised product for Autodesk. Worked closely with developers throughout 9-month process to create product that was used as part of Apple’s "Apps for Business Campaign" and featured prominently in Apple’s marketing.

Transitioned AutoCAD from desktop to online with web-based AutoCAD 360. Repurposed all platform-independent groundwork and learnings to create web app with multi-user editing.

Authored and released Standards Guide for UI that was subsequently used across multiple product lines.

Built workflows between applications as well as similar interfaces that created cohesion for use.

Shifted design to research-driven focus with continual user feedback and testing.

Writing

2021

When thinking about the journey from design lead to design manager the most critical thing to understand is your own motivations.

2021

Self-assessments & promo statements that get results for you and your team.

2021

Growing your processes, not just your team

2021

How to optimize your time (and calendar!) to be happier & more effective at work

Speaking

2019
Design Systems at Google at UX Manager Summit
Kirkland, WA

Design Systems have become a common strategy across the industry to delivering quality UX design at scale. This panel discusses how different teams at Google have operationalized a systematic approach to UX design, including challenges and lessons learned.

2019
Writing Promo Packets People Want to Read at UX Manager Summit
Kirkland, WA

People who don't want to be bored out of their mind reading lists of stats, jargon, projects code names, just to figure out how you've been impactful.

In this session we'll talk about how to structure a promo packet in a way that clearly communicates accomplishments in a way that is engaging. We'll talk about what committees are looking for in a packet. We'll discuss concepts and alternatives for structuring your content that will not only be clear and understandable but also be something committee members WANT to read. (So you and your staff get promoted!)"

2017
Seoul, South Korea

Jared Zimmerman shared his experience about what qualities a design manager should have and how to manage design teams. He shared his experience on how he successfully made use of the Design Thinking Process as a team management discipline and what he learned from the process.

2015
Menlo Park, CA

A dialogue about using design to build positive communities at scale. Panelists will include design leaders from other social products and people who design real-life interactions to share their perspectives on encouraging civil, constructive behaviors, handling bad actors effectively, and how communities can be empowered to self-regulate.

2015
London, England

What do you need to build communities of constructive, respectful individuals who collaborate together toward a common good, both in their words and actions? What is the impact of various social, technical, and product choices – such as strong ties between real world and online identities, reputation metrics, technical incentives, informal and formal community management structures – on civility and behavior of online communities? Are online communities more lenient toward online bad behavior as compared to face to face interactions? What societal shifts have occurred that make us divide the "real" from the online world? What can we learn from purely anonymous communities who express high levels of civility between their members? Finally, how does the changing nature of technology – the proliferation of devices, increased focus on ephemerality, and greater fragmentation of time and focus between many different sites and services – change the way we think of online communities and collaboration in the online space?

To answer these questions, this presentation will focus on examples from a wide range of online communities: other sites that seek to engage experts in high quality knowledge-gathering (e.g., Quora, StackExchange); more general purpose discussion fora (e.g., Reddit); and new discussion apps based on anonymity (e.g., Secret, Yik Yak). In hopes of share some specific best practices, as well as obvious pitfalls. This an exercise in thinking about how online communities can learn from each other to create self-sustaining communities of people who look out for each other, mentor and and teach new members, respect community norms while looking out for those who do not yet know them.

2014
London, England

The Wikimedia user experience team is working on many small and large improvements to the site that benefit readers and editors alike. The user experience team has lots of changes planned that will help elevate the projects to greatness. Changes that will surface content across projects, provide easier access to new and existing contributory features, and help to highlight our best asset: our editor community.

Volunteering

2017 — Now
Silicon Valley California

Our group organizes events during the year to provide educational, inspirational, and social experiences that enrich the lives of the creative community while fostering lifelong connections to the college.

2020 — 2020
Remote

Led month long 8 participant mentorship initiative connecting people from underrepresented communities to world-class tech leaders through intimate group mentorship sessions.

2019 — 2019
2015 — 2015
Stanford, CA

Shaping Davos @ Stanford University focuses on innovation and design thinking for social impact. It includes a series of sessions aimed to innovate around thorny real-world challenges while bolstering participants’ creative confidence through design thinking.

The activities undertaken at Stanford University are part of Shaping Davos, an initiative of the World Economic Forum that connects 40 cities around the world with the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. These events feed and extend the conversations going on in Davos.

The activities are hosted at the Stanford University d.school. The Global Shapers hub of Palo Alto organizes Shaping Davos @ Stanford University in coordination with the World Economic Forum’s Shaping Davos team. The Global Shapers Community is the under 30 multi-stakeholder community at the World Economic Forum.

2014 — 2014
Seoul, South Korea

Advised early to mid-stage startups on design, user experience, naming, and business strategy, through Kstartup the No. 1 startup accelerator in South Korea in partnership with Google for Entrepreneurs, SK Planet, and Banks Foundation.

2014 — 2014
San Francisco, CA

CodePath is an organization that provides free, accelerated mobile engineering classes for professional developers and designers.

Certifications

2020
Product Manager Training from Google
2015
Public Relations & Media Training from Oliver Global
2012
CEO Award from Autodesk

Being selected for this award means you are part of a special group of top performers at Autodesk whose talent, energy and commitment are making a significant difference to Autodesk’s success.

2005
TwoForAll: Type Design from Underware w/Bas Jacobs

Competition winner with Brandon Kauffman for modular type design

2005
Solar Decathlon

Selected for final display and judging. Collaboration with RISD architecture in international green building competition.

2005
International Design Expo from Microsoft

Competition winner with Matt Grigsby for RX medication distribution system

Contact

LinkedIn
Mastodon
Instagram
Google KG ID
Wikidata ID
Etherium ENS

Features

2014

Skinnier columns. Bigger images. White space. It was a brilliant vision proposed by Wikipedia’s in-house design staff, but Wikipedia’s own community rejected it.

2014

The design is subtle but prompts a political question: “Why isn’t there a universal typed language that is free for everyone to use?”