[ Resume ]

Jared Johnson.

Product and design manager with 10+ years practicing and leading design and product delivery teams across healthcare, finance, life sciences, and nonprofit organizations.

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Summary

Product and design manager with 10+ years practicing and leading design and product delivery teams across healthcare, finance, life sciences, and nonprofit organizations. I get teams close to the people they're building for, then help them ship with confidence—balancing what users need against what the business needs, from a single feature to a whole organization.

Practice lead at Solution Design Group, adjunct faculty in the University of Minnesota's UX program, and NN/g-trained researcher. Known for building design operations and delivery habits that keep products shipping and scaling long after launch.

Outside client work, I'm an advocate for foster, kinship, and adoptive families in Minnesota—and I bring human-centered design to the social services systems that support them.

Capabilities

User Experience Design. Research, prototyping, and usability testing with real users so products are clear, accessible, and easy to trust. Journey maps, service blueprints, personas, field observation, storyboards, and validated prototypes.

UX Strategy + Product Management. Partnering with product and technology leaders to frame problems, weigh user needs against business goals, prioritize roadmaps, and build the evidence behind a business case—from one feature to an enterprise portfolio.

Digital Product Enablement. Standing up the teams, design operations, governance, and agile delivery habits that let products keep shipping and scaling. Coaching cross-functional partners to raise organizational UX maturity.

Experience

Senior Experience Design Consultant + Practice Lead

Oct 2019 – Present

Solution Design Group · Golden Valley, MN

  • Lead client-facing, cross-functional design teams across multiple regions and service offerings, consolidating redundant work and scaling technology solutions through shared design operations.
  • Coach product, engineering, and business partners through training, workshops, and enterprise consulting that raises UX maturity and moves teams toward user-centered decisions.
  • Run the full design process—research, synthesis, prototyping, documentation, and accessible, brand-aligned delivery—with designers embedded in agile teams from planning to launch.
  • Apply AI-enabled tools (Figma Make, Lovable, Copilot) to speed research synthesis, concept development, rapid prototyping, and design system compliance; supported a design-to-code MCP server implementation.

Adjunct Faculty, User Experience Design

Jan 2025 – Jun 2026

University of Minnesota, College of Design · St. Paul, MN

  • Instructor for the UX program, bringing nonprofit and for-profit, public and private sector, and startup and enterprise perspective into the classroom.
  • Collaborated with product design, industrial design, and medical technology students and faculty to help grow the program.

Lead Experience Design Consultant

Sep 2018 – Sep 2019

NMDP | Be The Match · Minneapolis, MN

  • Ran focus groups, stakeholder and external user interviews, and usability testing for a nonprofit serving patients who need marrow and blood stem cell transplants.
  • Translated findings into service blueprints, user flows, wireframes, and prototypes at the fidelity each decision needed.

Graphic + Interactive Designer

Oct 2015 – Sep 2018

brightpeak financial | Thrivent · Minneapolis, MN

  • Designed responsive web and mobile experiences and stewarded brand standards across marketing channels.
  • Prioritized high-impact campaigns across paid search, social, blog content, and partner networks.

Education

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Multimedia Design · University of Wisconsin–Stout

2011

UX Management Certification · Nielsen Norman Group [NN/g]

2023

Skills + Tools

Design + research. User research, usability testing, journey mapping, systems analysis, service design, information architecture, interaction design, wireframing, prototyping, accessibility, design systems, visual design

Product + strategy. Product strategy, problem framing, roadmapping, stakeholder management, design operations, design leadership, Agile delivery, cross-functional facilitation

Tools. Figma, Figma Make, Lovable, Copilot, Claude, Miro, Mural, Adobe Creative Suite, UserTesting, Jira, Azure DevOps, Confluence, Lucidchart, Tableau, Power BI, Slack, Teams

[ Let's talk ]

Building something users should love? I'd like to hear about it.

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