Hi, I’m Jeff, a product designer specializing in UI design for developer and technical tools.

I enjoy translating complex, data-heavy problems into simple and beautiful user interfaces. I was formerly at LaunchDarkly, Gladly, and Optimizely.

The first time I uploaded an HTML file — a file of plain text — to a server and loaded it in a browser (IE 5), I was hooked. Anyone, anywhere in the world, could see what I had built. I had found the medium I would build my career on — the World Wide Web.

Ever since that moment, I’ve defined my career by straddling the line between design and code. I got my start building websites in high school, back when there was no distinction between “design” and “development,” and CSS wasn’t a “thing” yet. I indulged these twin interests by studying graphic communication and computer science at Cal Poly.

After college I went down the programming path by joining Cityspan as a Data Warehouse Developer. I built data models, database queries, reports, and UIs to access data. From that experience I discovered I could spend weeks tuning a SQL query to run faster, and customers would barely notice, or I could make a small tweak to the UI and get heaps of praise from customers. Which path would you pursue?

To further my design education, I studied user-centered design at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. While there I learned about research methods, prototyping, testing, sociology, law & policy, behavioral economics, and more.

I also took a class applying the learnings from behavioral economics to websites via A/B testing, which led me to join Optimizely after graduating. While there I continued moving between code and design, eventually becoming the Head of Design, leading a team of Product Designers, UX Researchers, and UI Engineers. In that role I integrated research and design with the engineering team's Agile delivery process, which helped teams focus on solving the biggest customer problems, and doubled the throughput of the design team. I also led the design systems team, which further brought design and engineering together while improved the quality of our UI.

After 5 and half years I was ready for a change, so I switched out of management and back to being a Product Designer at Casetext, where I helped build modern, easy-to-use legal tech tools.

That experience showed me I had a lot of strong opinions about how to build and run teams, so I went to Gladly to lead their product design team. The challenge there was to take the team from good to great. I did that by running the design systems team, making operational improvements (like defining our discovery process and career levels), and creating a personality for the product, which gave us a framework for adding more moments of delight.

After that I led the product design team at LaunchDarkly. The challenge there was growing and scaling the team. I went from a team of 3 to 12 in under a year and a half. I moved the team up the maturity ladder by hiring great people, forming a design system team, overhauling our visual design to match our new brand, and defining processes to improve the team's work, such as our discovery process and team critiques.

Scaling and maturing the team was a lot of work, and I felt the itch to return to my craft again. So I moved back to being an IC product designer in 2022 to work on LaunchDarkly's third product initiative. This was an exciting opportunity to build a product from the ground up, and to work on a small nimble team that would operate as a startup-within-a-startup. And that's what I've been working on ever since.

Outside of work I like to hang out with my daughter 👶, Poppy, walk our dog 🐕‍🦺, Emma, and of course drink wine 🍷 with my wife and have long meals together where we close down the restaurant and are the only people left. I also play tennis 🎾, music 🎶 (guitar 🎸, bass, and drums 🥁, but I’m pretty rusty now), hand letter ✍️, write 🖋️, and cook 🥘.

Bruno Bergher

VP of Product and Design at Gladly

Jeff is thoughtfulness and empathy incarnate. Yes, he's a very thoughtful designer and a skilled leader of design teams. But while managing him at Gladly, I saw how, into that package, he also packs: a prolific, precise writer; an analytical product manager (as he ran our design systems product team); a dedicated, disciplined people manager. You should work with Jeff and see it in practice.

Claire Vo

Chief Product Officer at Optimizely

As Optimizely's design lead, Jeff had a significant impact on the product, team and company culture. Responsible for design, research and UI engineering, Jeff was instrumental in delivering a "consumer-grade" user experience to Optimizely's customers. [...] I was especially impressed with his hiring and team building skills; he put tons of thought into our interviewing and on-boarding processes, which lead to a happy and effective design team.

Selected Work

Popular Posts

  • Site Redesign I: The Guiding Concept

    As some of you may have noticed, I (semi-)recently gave my site a visual overhaul. It's far more opinionated than before, so I want to document my decision making process over the next couple of posts.

  • What to Expect if I'm Your Manager

    This past January I started my new gig at Gladly, managing the product design team. Unlike at Optimizely, where I transitioned into managing people I already worked with, at Gladly I inherited a team who didn't know me at all. Inspired by my new boss who did the same thing, I wrote a document to describe what my new team could expect from me as their manager. I decided to re-publish that document here. Enjoy.

  • Building an MVPP - A Minimum Viable Product we're Proud of

    On November 18th, 2014, we publicly released Optimizely's iOS editor. This was a big release for us because it marked the end of a months-long public beta in which we received a ton of customer feedback and built a lot of missing features.

  • Why I Became a Design Manager

    At the start of 2015, I officially became a Design Manager at Optimizely. I transitioned from an individual contributor, product design role into a leadership role. So why did I become a Design Manager?

A Few of My Beliefs About Design

  • Design is not the center of the universe. Design is one function of many at an organization.
  • Other departments have more customer contact than you. Listen to them.
  • Design needs to be aligned to the needs of the business, and deliver measurable business value. Don't design for design's sake.
  • Design doesn't own the customer experience. A great customer experience is the emergent outcome of the contributions of every department.

Pete Koomen

Co-founder of Optimizely

Jeff is a strong design leader who helped build Optimizely's design team from scratch. He knows how to hire & manage a design team, make them effective & efficient, and keep them happy. He has a strong understanding of user centered design and what it takes to ship great user experiences. He's also a pleasure to work with and a strong addition to any team.

Susan Park

Senior Product Designer at Gladly

Jeff was my manager at Gladly and I had a great experience with him! He made many improvements to our design team and framed our weeklys to share knowledge, frameworks, and build team harmony. He always supported me and did what he could to unblock me. I always looked forward to our meetings and would recommend him to help build any design team.

Side Projects

Conference Talks

Get in Touch

You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, Medium, LinkedIn, Github, and Gmail (jlzych@). View my full resume online.