Fast activation
Paid Fusion customers downloading within 30 minutes increased by 5.8 points at 90% confidence.
Led design for the controlled activation experiment.James Schmittler
Senior UX & Product Design Leader
Growth, Platform Strategy & Organizational Scale
I help organizations move.
I am an organizational architect who transforms ambiguity into aligned action by building trust, creating clarity, and enabling people to do the best work of their careers.
Senior UX and Product Design leadership across enterprise platforms, growth, customer lifecycle experiences, and organizational systems.
Fun factA few things about James
Leadership measured by what changes.
A selection of customer, business, and organizational outcomes from the work.
Account reach
Monthly-user surface scale for the post-purchase platform; not an outcome caused by the redesign.
Onboarding
Reduced onboarding time by redesigning workflows, decision points, and team operating practices.
Led the experience and operating-model changes with cross-functional partners.Annual growth
Company/product growth to which the three cross-functional teams and broader organization contributed; not solely attributable to design.
Aligned UX strategy with customer and market needs as Director of User Experience.Selected transformations.
Three cases showing platform strategy, service-system design, and organizational leadership.
Autodesk · 2023–Present
Account 3.0
A fragmented account portal→A shared story for post-purchase value
The interface was a symptom. The real problem was that many teams owned pieces of the journey, but no one owned the customer’s understanding of it.
- Role
- Manager, Digital Experience
- Mandate
- Lead UX strategy for Autodesk’s post-purchase signed-in experience and shape a reusable growth platform across account, product access, learning, subscriptions, insights, and support.
- Scope
- Design, Product, Engineering, Research, Content, Lifecycle Marketing, Customer Success, and platform partners
Fast activation
Paid Fusion customers downloading within 30 minutes increased by 5.8 points at 90% confidence.
Led design for the controlled activation experiment.
Autodesk · 2023–Present
Success Offerings
Premium services without a clear story→Success designed as a scalable system
Customers could not see meaningful differentiation between service tiers. Internally, benefits were fragmented across organizations and destinations.
- Role
- Manager, Digital Experience
- Mandate
- Shape a scalable digital customer-success model spanning learning, coaching, support, planning, and insights.
- Scope
- Design, Product, Engineering, Research, Analytics, Customer Success, Support, Learning, and business leadership
Customer-success system
Learning, coaching, planning, support, and insight were organized around customer jobs and next actions.
Led the experience strategy and portfolio framing.
Thomson Reuters · 2021–2023
Legal Platform
A portfolio of capable but disconnected products→A coherent legal operating system
The design challenge was larger than any workflow. Customers needed matters, tasks, documents, budgets, spend, billing, analytics, and collaboration to behave like one system.
- Role
- Director, User Experience
- Mandate
- Lead three cross-functional product teams and align UX strategy, portfolio priorities, systems, and measurement across connected legal workflows.
- Scope
- Three cross-functional product teams plus design, research, product, engineering, go-to-market, and executive partners
High-value tasks
Improvement across the five highest-value tasks using Pendo behavior data, customer insight, and iterative changes.
Led UX strategy and experience measurement across the product teams.
Great work becomes possible when the room knows how to move.
One operating model. Six connected moves.
Make complexity visible. Create shared direction. Design the operating model. Grow leadership capacity. Measure what changes. Leave the room able to move without waiting for me.
Executive operating modelComplexity → aligned action
The conditions entering the room
Complexity
Make complexity visible
Map the customer journey, platform dependencies, incentives, and constraints before narrowing the problem.
In practice
Reframed Autodesk Account from a fragmented portal into the primary post-purchase platform serving roughly 1.5 million monthly users.
Create a shared direction
Turn complexity into a story people can understand, challenge, and act on.
In practice
Established shared design tenets, KPIs, and a post-purchase platform vision across Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Research, Content, and Marketing.
Design the operating model
Clarify decisions, ownership, rituals, and how teams work together.
In practice
Restored momentum during organizational churn by clarifying ownership and creating planning systems across multiple workstreams.
Grow leadership capacity
Create space for others to own decisions, lead visibly, and build confidence.
In practice
Led globally distributed teams across North America and EMEA, from developing designers to autonomous Principal-level leaders.
Measure what changes
Track customer outcomes, team capability, and whether the system continues to improve.
In practice
Operationalized time-to-download, assignment, utilization, and onboarding KPIs across beta releases reaching more than 120,000 users.
Aligned action
The room can move without waiting for me.
The goal is not dependency on leadership. It is a team that understands the system, owns the decisions, and can continue making progress.
Principles for when the answer is not obvious.
The operating model is the spine. These principles support decisions when trust, speed, coherence, and autonomy pull in different directions.
Story before solution
People cannot align around something they do not understand.
Trust before execution
The quality of the work depends on the strength of the relationships behind it.
Alignment over agreement
Progress does not require everyone to prefer the same answer. It requires everyone to understand the choice.
Design the system, not just the screen
The interface is only one part of the experience. Ownership, decisions, incentives, and operations shape it too.
Momentum beats perfection
Progress creates learning. Learning creates better decisions.
Leave people better than you found them
The best outcome is a stronger product and a more capable, confident team.
Outside the room, I still make things move.
I live in Minnesota with my wife, Emily, our daughters, Matilda and Ramona, and our dog, Dot. Woodworking, 3D printing, time outside, and family adventures keep the systems thinker in me grounded in tangible work.
Read the full story ↗
What difficult problem are you trying to move?
If the work needs alignment across a complicated product landscape, not just another deliverable, reach out and let's chat about how I can help.