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Jake Zien

Full-stack product designer with ~15 years' experience across product strategy, interaction design, and engineering. Business-minded designer, design-minded developer.

Experience

Lead Product Designer

at Gecko Robotics

2023present

Hardware and software for industrial inspections

  • Reoriented an unmoored team toward the highest-value thing to build, then led a 3-week sprint across product, design, and dev to transform a rough prototype into a shipped v1, winning a $5M contract and customer raves
  • Led hiring process to grow design team from 1 to 3; managed and mentored a more junior designer
  • Led comprehensive jobs-to-be-done analysis of the full industrial asset lifecycle, mapping workflows across user types to define product direction for a major platform redesign
  • Work across every product team and vertical, from navy to mining to power plants, donning a hard hat to embed with customers on site and rapidly iterate on product direction, design, and code
  • Leverage AI daily to multiply my impact in design, eng, product, and admin work; prototype in code and contribute production frontend regularly; choose the fastest, best medium for each situation
  • First product design hire, reporting directly to Head of Product

Lead Product Designer

at Culdesac

20212023

Real estate developer building car-free neighborhoods

  • First full-time design hire; reported to & collaborated directly with cofounders
  • Owned the digital resident experience for America's first car-free neighborhood, from business strategy to eng-ready design specs and my own commits
  • Ran strategy, research, and design on marketing & leasing websites
  • Expanded design beyond a screen-based practice into a strategic partner of product and leadership
  • Mentored younger colleagues, who found the design education "taught [them] the most in this job"

Senior Product Designer

at CBRE

20172021

Fortune 150 real estate company's software innovation team

  • Led design and co-led product for Site IQ, a web app for broker teams; product strategy was durable enough that it remains in active use & development
  • Self-initiated CBRE Build, a new brand for tech teams within CBRE: led research, design, and pitching, winning approval directly from CEO Bob Sulentic
  • Implemented the brand across digital and physical spaces in NYC, Seattle, Texas, and India; earned a positive review on Brand New
  • Only design/eng staffer to survive an 80% staff reduction

Founding Designer

at Floored

20122017

Acquired by CBRE

Eng-driven maker of online 3D tools for real estate teams

  • First design hire; collaborated directly with founders and founding engineers
  • Owned UX and UI design for Floored's products, from sketch to delivery with engineers
  • Created and implemented Floored brand and marketing

Founding Designer

at Stamped

20112012

Acquired by Yahoo

Social recommendations app

    Projects

    Shutterbug

    iOS & macOS photo app

    In dev

    Burst-aware, delete-forward gallery for the way we actually shoot

    • Designed and engineered a native photo management app in Swift (SwiftUI + UIKit/AppKit) with cross-device sync; not just a prototype but a real app approaching TestFlight
    • Interaction design playground: obsessive iteration on core mechanics to arrive at a lightweight workflow that makes sifting for keepers as easy as idly browsing photos
    • Used AI as an eng collaborator to go deep on clustering algorithms, building a custom solution to the app's core concept and extending my reach as a designgineer beyond what would be possible for me alone
    • Learning project to teach myself Swift and platform APIs from SwiftUI to AppKit, Core Data to VisionKit
    • Loving homage to the juicy, high-production-value apps that inspired me to be a designer

    'Inventor' of Pivot Power

    at Quirky

    2010

    Crowdsourced invention company's breakout bestseller

    • With Quirky's help, created Pivot Power, the iconic flexible power strip that defined the company: millions of units sold from Target to the MOMA Store; Red Dot Design Award; included in the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's permanent collection
    • Featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Engadget, Gizmodo, and CNET

    Education

    Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)

    BA in Graphic Design

    2007–2011  |  Providence, RI

    Brown University

    Minor in Computer Science

    2008–2011  |  Providence, RI

    Through RISD's cross-registration program with Brown, and summer courses at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), I earned credits worth a minor in Computer Science.

    Tech

    • Swift: SwiftUI, AppKit, UIKit, Core Data
    • React, Node, NextJS, GatsbyJS
    • Vercel, Netlify, Lambda
    • Firebase or your favorite DB
    • Tailwind, styled-components, Stylus, sass, SCSS, and so on, plus real CSS
    • A bit of Ruby & Python
    • Figma, Weavy AI, Adobe, Framer, Affinity, Webflow, Shopify, you name it
    • Claude Code, Cursor, Figma Make, v0, etc. (But I can actually code, not just vibe)
    • Keyboard shortcut savant

    Personal

    • Native of Milwaukee, WI; have lived in NYC for 15 years
    • Talented communicator and public speaker
    • Natural mentor/educator
    • "Jake is playful in his work, and it's inspiring"
    • Will probably make you laugh, usually intentionally
    • Loves animals