The work is for someone else.
I’m Jason Sonderman. I build design teams that can run without me, and I think in systems — how the team, the tooling, and the handoffs actually fit together. Craft matters to me, but only as far as it makes someone’s life better. Twenty years of trying to do that through the software people use has taught me that the only honest way is to stay genuinely curious, listen more than you talk, and resist the rush toward solutions before the problem is really understood.
20+ years in UX design and strategy Design teams built in 4 countries NNG UXMC CPACC
Featured Case Studies
- Harmony Design System — Arcos, IncDesign Systems & Infrastructure
Harmony: A Design System Built for Machines
What happens to a design system when AI agents are first-class consumers — and how building two prior systems shaped the architecture that finally closes the gap.
What design systems become when AI is a first-class consumer — and what three companies of building them taught me about the architecture that closes the gap between human-readable and machine-executable.
- Arcos, IncSystems Architecture
The Handoff Is the Bug
How restructuring the design-to-dev pipeline at Arcos cut kickoff time from two weeks to three days — one shared design language for UX, engineering, and AI.
At Arcos, design specs were thorough but not executable — developers made hundreds of small judgment calls per feature, and AI entering the pipeline automated the ambiguity instead of solving it. I built Harmony as a context-rich npm package paired with Storybook and Zeplin MCPs, giving UX, engineering, and AI a shared design language. Kickoff compressed from two weeks to three days; a testable coded concept now takes 12 hours instead of ~40.
- Arcos, Inc — UX Leadership & AI DeliveryLeadership & Culture
From Delivery to Direction
What an AI-assisted delivery model revealed about where design creates its highest value — and why speed without clarity of purpose just accelerates the wrong thing.
When the delivery pipeline started working, the recovered capacity had to go somewhere. This is the story of what the efficiency revealed: that the upstream problem — purpose, data shape, user intent — is harder and more valuable than the downstream one. And what it means when your team’s documented ways of working become the training set for an AI agent someone else built.
- Arcos, IncUX Leadership
UX as Organizational Strategy
Arcos had never had formal UX before I arrived. This is the story of how I built the credibility, process, and relationships to make UX a necessary voice in what gets built — not just how it looks.
Arcos had tried to build a Timesheet capability once before UX existed, and it missed. The second attempt was shaped with aggregated user data and POCs tested against roughly 50 field users before engineering committed — and it shipped. That shift, from receiving specs to shaping scope, is what two years of earning credibility with resistant and receptive engineering pods alike actually bought.
Behind the work
Every case study here has a machine-readable twin, generated from the same
source that renders the page rather than written alongside it. Below is
the top of this site’s /llms.txt — what an agent gets when it
asks for a map. It’s built from the case-study frontmatter at deploy time,
so it can’t quietly drift out of sync with the pages it describes.
# Jason Sonderman
> Head of UX with 20+ years leading global design teams, building AI-native design systems, and shaping AI-assisted delivery models.
This file is a map, not the content. For the complete site content in one request — every case study, the about page, and professional experience — see llms-full.txt.
- Full content: https://jason.sonderman.info/llms-full.txt
- About: https://jason.sonderman.info/about/ (markdown: https://jason.sonderman.info/about.md)
- Experience / resume: https://jason.sonderman.info/experience/ (markdown: https://jason.sonderman.info/experience.md)
## Status and contact
Open to new roles as of August 2026. Most recent role: Head of UX at Arcos, Inc (Oct 2024 – Jul 2026).The same instinct runs through the work itself. Three threads, if you build this kind of thing too:
- Design systems, three times
Fulcrum, Uplift, and Harmony — three design systems across three organizations, and what each attempt corrected about the one before it.
- Research that reframed the product
Two and a half months of embedded field research across 14 utility sites, and what survived two rounds of scope cuts.
- AI-assisted delivery, and what it changed
Rebuilding the design-to-development handoff around AI, what running it revealed about the design function, and the same model turned back on this site.
More about my approach
I approach design as a way of understanding a system before trying to change it. The people doing the work, the constraints around them, and the handoffs between teams matter as much as anything that appears on a screen.
That means sitting with people in their actual context. It means doing the research when speed is the pressure, and designing something, watching it not quite work, and treating that as the real beginning rather than a setback.
The best outcomes I’ve been part of didn’t happen because I knew the answer going in. They happened because I stayed curious long enough to find it — and because I led teams where missing the mark was expected, learned from, and used to make the next attempt stronger. Often the improvements are invisible to the people they benefit. That’s not a failure of visibility. That’s the point.
That approach came from twenty years of paying attention, from leading teams across four countries, and from a faith practice that taught me early to resist collapsing a hard question too soon.
“I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations. If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
— David Bowie
