Activation
Led design strategy for a guided post-purchase experience that increased paid Fusion customers downloading within 30 minutes from 37.6% to 43.4%, a 5.8-point lift, while reducing median time to download from 3 minutes to 1.
Résumé
James Schmittler
Senior UX & Product Design Leader Growth, Platform Strategy & Organizational Scale
Savage, Minnesotajschmittler@icloud.comlinkedin.com/in/jschmittlersystemsandstories.meExecutive Profile
Design executive with 15+ years leading UX strategy, product vision, and multidisciplinary teams across enterprise SaaS, customer platforms, media, legal, financial, and healthcare experiences. Connects customer insight to measurable business outcomes, turns complex portfolios into coherent systems, and builds operating models that help design, product, research, and engineering move faster with greater conviction. Experienced in growth experimentation, post-purchase journeys, platform modernization, design systems, and executive storytelling.
Selected Leadership Impact
Growth Strategy
Defined a signed-in growth vision spanning activation, value realization, retention, and expansion for Autodesk's Reach segment, which represents roughly 90% of customers.
Portfolio Leadership
Directed teams and cross-functional partners across account, learning, subscriptions, user management, insights, and support experiences, aligning work to shared customer journeys and business scorecards.
Organizational Scale
Built and led interdisciplinary UX teams, standardized design vision and prioritization, and introduced systems and practices that improved quality, speed, and cross-functional decision-making.
Experience
Manager, Digital Experience
Autodesk
- Lead UX strategy for Autodesk's post-purchase signed-in experience, shaping a personalized platform that helps customers access products, realize value, manage subscriptions, learn, and grow.
- Led design for a controlled Fusion activation experiment that lifted downloads within 30 minutes from 37.6% to 43.4% (+5.8 points at 90% confidence) and cut median time to download from 3 minutes to 1.
- Translated the activation result into an estimated 170 additional fast activations annually and approximately $139K in Fusion ARR influenced, clearly distinguishing modeled renewal value from incremental bookings.
- Co-led WWM-DEC's first cross-functional design sprint, aligning design, product, research, lifecycle marketing, platform, and executive partners around six critical journeys, seven customer values, and four customer-tested prototypes.
- Established a portfolio vision for signed-in growth across activation, value realization, retention, and expansion, with reusable capabilities designed to work across account, in-product, messaging, learning, and assistant surfaces.
- Directed work across account information architecture, guided onboarding, subscriptions, micro-admin user management, learning, community, insights, and support, connecting experience decisions to activation, retention, and revenue metrics.
- Championed scalable patterns, experience governance, and earlier design-engineering collaboration to improve coherence and reduce delivery friction across a complex enterprise ecosystem.
Director, User Experience
Thomson Reuters
- Led three cross-functional product teams and aligned UX strategy with customer and market needs, contributing to 44% annual growth.
- Standardized design vision, portfolio prioritization, goals, and experience measurement across multiple product lines.
- Improved success across the five highest-value tasks by 10% using Pendo behavior data, customer insight, and iterative product changes.
- Reduced onboarding time from two months to two weeks by redesigning workflows, decision points, and team operating practices.
- Expanded a scalable design system across product lines to improve consistency, accessibility, and delivery efficiency.
Senior Manager, User Experience
Thomson Reuters
- Built and managed an interdisciplinary UX organization serving legal, financial, corporate, and media customers.
- Directed the redesign and relaunch of Reuters.com in under six months, modernizing the experience while improving accessibility and editorial flexibility.
- Coached designers and partners through complex portfolio decisions, balancing customer outcomes, technical constraints, and business priorities.
Team Lead, User Experience
Thomson Reuters
- Embedded design earlier in product discovery and strategy, creating foundations for multi-year platform initiatives.
- Advanced agile and lean UX practices that improved team velocity, clarity, and collaboration with product and engineering.
UX Design & Leadership Roles
Cook Medical, Envisage Technologies & Other Organizations
- Designed healthcare marketing and digital experiences, enterprise training-management tools for first responders, and customer-facing web products across regulated and high-complexity domains.
- Progressed from hands-on interaction and visual design into research, product strategy, team leadership, and design operations.
Core Leadership Capabilities
- UX & Product Strategy
- Growth & Lifecycle Design
- Portfolio Vision & Roadmaps
- Executive Communication
- Cross-Functional Leadership
- Organizational Change
- Experimentation & Metrics
- Customer Research
- Journey & Service Design
- Design Systems
- Platform & Enterprise UX
- Information Architecture
- Team Building & Coaching
- Design Operations
- Talent Development
- AI-Enabled Experiences
- Personalization
- B2B & B2C SaaS
Education
Indiana University Bloomington
MS, Human-Computer Interaction & Design
BS, Informatics
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