I may have never taken a professional headshot, but I sure have shipped frameworks and foundations for some huge projects. And had a few laughs along the way.

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 an ad agency in New York. Since then, I've worked at startups and more ad agencies, spent several years at Xbox and Microsoft, and most recently spent time in adtech at LiveRamp and The Trade Desk. I’ve found myself focusing mostly on productivity and enterprise experiences, 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 has 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 supported an 850-person product and engineering organization. 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 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 familiar initiatives focusing on both ingestion (of huge data, not video games) and facilitating partnerships between companies. LiveRamp taught me tons, too. That healthier ratio, and working with product and designs org thirsty for design collaboration evolved my ability to disagree and commit. Being at a smaller company also led to tons more opportunity to start with clean canvases. My work in the partner space took a concept from a design sprint to shaping overarching partner strategy and the ingestion work took a process that once ate three days down to a few minutes.

These days, I’m at The Trade Desk, working on design systems, interaction frameworks, and product development process improvements.

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.