These things always start with “Hey there”
I'm Jon Anderson (he/him), a Product Designer and former Military Leader. I started my path in design in a cliched way - sorting mail for a mid-sized ad agency in New York. Since then, I've worked at startups and more ad agencies, spent several years at Xbox + Microsoft, and most recently at LiveRamp. I’ve found myself focusing mostly on productivity and enterprise experiences for the past ten years or so, with somewhat specific concentrations on ingestion and partnership experiences.
At Microsoft I spent the bulk of my time focused on empowering game developers and publishers to more quickly iterate on and publish their products. This area of responsibility combined (very) complicated user and business problems with my love for video games and the games industry. The scale and complexity of these projects have let me develop a practical, systemic design approach, augmenting an outcome-driven methodology. Please don't let those buzz words lead you astray: I am deeply empathetic of the people using my experiences and I enjoy challenging the status quo.
That led to a broader responsibility over the entirety of Partner experiences at Microsoft, hiring and managing a team of five while leading design vision, strategy, and execution. That team of five Enabling my team to do their best work while being personally and professionally fulfilled became the best part of that job.
I learned so so so much during my time at Microsoft. I learned how to attach my ideas to outcomes and sell them to executives. I learned the difference between managing designers and leading soldiers. I learned that if you wait long enough, drop shadows will always come back into style. But most importantly, I learned to listen to my gut if I ever have the chance to hire my own boss ever again.
In 2021, in pursuit of a healthier designer to engineer ratio, I left Microsoft for the data collaboration company LiveRamp. Accidentally, or maybe serendipitously, I found myself leading initiatives focusing on both ingestion (of huge data, not video games) and facilitating partnerships between companies. LiveRamp has taught me tons, too. That healthier ratio, and working with product and designs org thirsty for design collaboration has evolved my ability to disagree and commit. Being at a smaller company has also led to tons more opportunity to start with clean canvases, like taking the concept of partnership from a design sprint to a shipping initiative that reduced churn and opened doors for our clients.
My personal interests include coaching and overthinking Little League baseball, skiing, sharing the joy retro video games with my children, drinking cold brew iced coffee, and introducing my kids to Pop Punk and Dance Music.
I live in Seattle, WA, but still act like I’m in Jersey.