The work is for someone else.
I'm Jason Sonderman, Head of UX. I've spent twenty years trying to make people's lives a little better through the software they use — and learning that the only honest way to do that is to stay genuinely curious, listen more than you talk, and resist the rush toward solutions before the problem is really understood.
More about my approach
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
My Values
Featured Case Studies
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- Harmony Design System — Arcos, LLCDesign 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, 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 LLCUX 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 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.
- TVH Parts Co.Design Systems & Infrastructure
Uplift: Fixing the Org Before Fixing the Design System
How moving design system engineers under UX ownership — and co-designing governance with an engineering advocate — turned a neglected component library into shared infrastructure across four brand tech teams.
At TVH, a design system existed in name only — engineers had stopped trusting it and were building their own components. Moving DS engineers under UX and co-designing governance with an engineering advocate stabilized the system and expanded it to four brand tech teams and 15 front-end developers, with a token architecture that would underpin the company's planned international brand consolidation.
