Jared Schmidt

Background

About Jared Schmidt

I'm an experienced professional Product Leader and Team Manager. Here is what that means: I cultivate Products like a garden. I curate their value through the thoughtful selection of features, components, and integrations. At the same time, I work to improve the technical foundations in which these are rooted. I delight in planning out living strategic roadmaps. My collaborative approach uncovers and prioritizes known goals while also accommodating for emergence of the unknown. I use iterative development to drive ongoing innovation, creative problem-solving, and sustainable execution. Within this method, evidence and data provide nourishing insights to feed incremental growth, divergent thinking and experimentation fuel evolution. Like an anthropologist, I'm curious about people and how they interact with the world. I focus on users. But I also include anyone else indirectly impacted by processes or products. Their experiences fascinate me and I care about what happens to them. So, with consent, I talk with and research them. I watch them in action. Where possible, I take a first-person view of their account. I gather as much data as possible to analyze their activities and behavior. My goal is to understand and use whatever insights I can gather to illuminate the path to making products better. I do my best to remain considerate, humble, practical, and reasonable in my approach to execution. It gives me the flexibility to both take creative risks and treat people with respect. I'm direct and straightforward. Tactful but blunt. I have fun with my work and don't play politics. My bias is towards action - making things happen, and creating value. As such, I relentlessly streamline and automate, where possible, non-value-added work. And I deliver. 16+ years of shipping work can attest to that. But I can't do it alone. To achieve the above, I build and manage teams - creative, analytical, and technical teams alike. I lead them to ship and sustain ongoing development. Together, we take ownership of outcomes and, indeed, the very success of the product. Most importantly, I coach people to be more successful and content with their work, on their own terms. My own primary measure of success is the extent to which people on my teams find fulfillment in their work - that, at the end of the day, they can walk away feeling happy, psychologically safe, and that they have contributed something of value. In short: I work with awesome people, doing the best job and building the best things we can today, so that we can do and build them better tomorrow.