United States

Product Design

Graphic Design

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Branding and Identity Design

Generalist Product Management

UX writing

UX Research

Jon Billett

Freelance/Fractional - Graphic & Product Design (former Director/VP)

Instagram

Relationship management

Qualitative research

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Time management

Empathy

Presentation skills

Conflict resolution

Stakeholder management

Leadership

AI/ML

Content creation

Design systems

Market research

User research

UserTesting

Webflow

Adobe Illustrator

Asana

ChatGPT

Figma

Notion

Adobe Creative Suite

Team player

Organisation skills

Critical-thinking

Project management

Public Speaking

Branding

Conversational AI

Content strategy

Information architecture

LinkedIn writing

Typography

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Learn essential burnout prevention techniques and replenish physical and emotional energy.

Managing burnout

Talk to people who have learned to manage their imposter syndrome.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

Understanding factors that lead to a motivated team - recognition, communication and more.

Keeping team members motivated

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to create a positive workplace culture that drives collaboration and productivity?

Fostering a good team culture

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

How to maintain trust, commitment, accountability deliver results while handling conflict

Avoiding common dysfunctions

Tips for transitioning into a new role or company.

Changing roles

How to successfully prepare and position yourself for a job promotion?

How to get promoted

How to ask for a promotion and negotiate for salary raise?

Negotiating a job offer

How to think about design career paths and what progression looks like for designers?

Design career path

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

Tips on how to work and collaborate with designers.

Working with designers

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Managing being the only designer at your company and working with non-designers.

Being the only designer

Explore different generative and evaluative research techniques. User research synthesis and presentation.

Conducting good user research

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

How to define an ambitious product vision and how to best communicate it to stakeholders?

Creating a product vision

Tips on how to work and collaborate with engineers and developers.

Working with engineers

Best practices for documenting projects, epics, and stories

Writing product requirement documents

After several months away exploring another avenue, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to rejoin the talented and kind team at Guru as a boomerang employee.

Since then, I have continued to collaborate with some of the most amazing people on a variety of projects and initiatives across the organization as a player/coach on the Product Design team. Highlights include: developing and refining our User Research Ops and enabling best practices across our Product and Customer-facing teams; leading high-profile research initiatives, generating insights and outputs that have significantly impacted our company-wide GTM strategy and product roadmap; managing and providing senior leadership to a team of the most talented Product Designers I have ever encountered; or even rolling up my IC sleeves and serving as the lead Product Designer on our latest cutting-edge AI-driven features, helping Guru’s users to author and consume content in innovative ways using generative AI technology.

As the founding Design hire and Executive team leader at Apprentice, it was been my responsibility to immediately impact the product experience (including a full webapp redesign and design system implementation), further develop the Apprentice brand, build and scale empowered Design teams (on both the Product and the Brand side), establish cross-functional communication, processes and relationships within a remote culture and assist in achieving our hyper-growth business goals.

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Life Science manufacturing teams are building some of the most innovative and time-sensitive products in the world today. Their software desperately needs to catch up. Apprentice.io delivers the only modern and intelligent platform built specifically for the advanced techniques used by today’s life science teams to help drastically increase speed to market, improve yield per batch, reduce deviations and save human lives.

-- Guru’s founding product designer; establish the UX process and practice, and help lead the growth of our Saas product, while we exponentially grew a stat sheet of KPIs & OKRs (9x MRR, 345x users, 90x paid accounts, 8x team growth, etc)

-- Foster the development, and empowerment of our exceptional Product Design and Brand Design team members. Navigate daily challenges within a high-growth org, overcome resource and technical constraints, secure multiple rounds of funding, and successfully manage ops during an unprecedented global pandemic.

-- Collaborate closely w/ founders, C-suite, and cross-functional stakeholders to create a dedicated team for Guru's Self-Service & Onboarding product pillar. Our roadmap, initiatives, and iterative approach resulted in significant improvements across key metrics, including top-of-funnel performance, trial-to-paid customer conversions, activated users, feature adoption, engagement, and user retention.

-- Worked with some of the brightest, authentic and talented people I have ever known, who have been instrumental in shaping my experiences and insights, through success and failure. These collective experiences have enriched my journey and continue to influence my professional growth to this day. 

-- Partner closely w/ PM, Eng, Data Science, PMM, CX, C-Suite, founders and other cross-functional stakeholders to drive decision making, strategic initiatives and experiments, and timely delivery of the product.

-- Other responsibilities include: establishing and building a team around our Design Systems and language guidelines; leading the foundational planning and execution of our user research process; guiding the product experience vision across multiple platforms and product areas. focusing on ease of use, familiarity, value, delight, and outcomes; resource planning, process improvement, fostering a culture of trust, transparency, strong communication, recruiting & hiring, and a healthy amount hands-on IC work when necessary.

Founding design hire establishing the brand, product design and UX research practices at a fast-paced and rapidly scaling Philly tech startup that provides e-commerce teams with a fully automated and intelligent solution to help them exponentially increase their online revenue. Our suite of cloud-based products provided our 1000s of customers the transparency, trust and control that enabled our systems to clearly demonstrate the impact that Sidecar’s advanced machine-learning technology was having on their business. 

Sidecar was acquired in Dec 2021 by Quartile.com

Designing the end-to-end experience for the future of streaming content on the go.

-- In preparation for the launch of Comcast’s first-ever full scale interface redesign, I was contracted on a 1-year project to be player/coach on a team of UX Designers and Engineers in successfully migrating the digital TV-screen experience to a next-gen tablet and mobile streaming experience on both iOS and Android devices.

Digital agency in the Philadelphia area specializing in mobile app developing, digital marketing campaigns and brand development. It was here that I led our foundational efforts in growing our agency's UX capabilities and offerings during the mobile and responsive boom of the late 00's/early 10's.

Clients include: GSK, Astra Zeneca, Comcast, Arcadia University, Pierce College, The Philadelphia Zoo, Airgas, Alfred Angelo Bridal and more.

Your typical entry-level design gig at a small agency in the ‘burbs

Clients: Citibank, Visa, Middleton Tobacco, Dorney Park, lots of local mom n’ pop shops

Jon Billett🇺🇸

About Jon Billett

Expertise

What mentees say