John W. Long A multi-discipline product leader with 20+ years experience building web apps & leading software teams.
Currently seeking a blended leadership role where I can collaborate on product and design.
About me
In past roles, I’ve been a Product Manager, Product Designer, and Frontend Engineer.
My approach to product is grounded in action, prioritizing business objectives based on real customer insights. I believe in quickly testing ideas in production and iterating based on feedback and user behavior. For the modern software team product-led growth must be the focus—solving real business problems in a way that creates passionate users.
Collaboration, coaching, and managing by influence are the primary tools I use to lead teams. In the spirit of old-school Agile, I believe in people over process. If a methodology is necessary, I’ve found the most success with Kanban or Shape Up.
John possesses one of the sharpest product minds I’ve encountered. His passion for delivering high-quality solutions is matched only by his ability to maintain focus on both the smallest details and the broader strategic vision.
John is an exceptional product manager with a fantastic combination of customer-focused thinking and a deep understanding of good design. His ability to prioritize the customer experience while seamlessly executing on plans is nothing short of inspiring.
John was a tremendous help in revamping the UX around Value Streams. John took a fresh look at the whole experience and did a complete revamp of the UX, making the product much more intuitive and appealing in the process.
John possesses the rare ability to lead a product from concept through to full implementation. His dedication to ensuring an optimal customer journey and seamless user experience is evident in every phase of the product lifecycle.
John is one of those rare people who bring expertise across design, product, and software development. He’s a great leader and ardent defender of the customer. As a result, every product John touches gets better.
John was the best first hire we could hope for: engaged, passionate, super talented and a great recruiter of other talent to boot. He’s a rare design-gineer that can be so incredibly powerful, especially on the right cross functional teams. Highly recommend.
John is one of the most thoughtful design leaders I’ve had the pleasure to work with. John and I worked closely together on a number of new products & initiatives at CloudBees, including product reimaginings of Jenkins and CloudBees Core. I’d work with him again in a heartbeat!
John’s ability to generate market insights, his design intuition, and his vision for the future helped us mold a best-in-class product competing with teams orders of magnitude larger. I was consistently impressed by John’s ability to wear a multiple of hats simultaneously.
John possesses one of the sharpest product minds I’ve encountered. His passion for delivering high-quality solutions is matched only by his ability to maintain focus on both the smallest details and the broader strategic vision.
John is an exceptional product manager with a fantastic combination of customer-focused thinking and a deep understanding of good design. His ability to prioritize the customer experience while seamlessly executing on plans is nothing short of inspiring.
John was a tremendous help in revamping the UX around Value Streams. John took a fresh look at the whole experience and did a complete revamp of the UX, making the product much more intuitive and appealing in the process.
John possesses the rare ability to lead a product from concept through to full implementation. His dedication to ensuring an optimal customer journey and seamless user experience is evident in every phase of the product lifecycle.
John is one of those rare people who bring expertise across design, product, and software development. He’s a great leader and ardent defender of the customer. As a result, every product John touches gets better.
John was the best first hire we could hope for: engaged, passionate, super talented and a great recruiter of other talent to boot. He’s a rare design-gineer that can be so incredibly powerful, especially on the right cross functional teams. Highly recommend.
John is one of the most thoughtful design leaders I’ve had the pleasure to work with. John and I worked closely together on a number of new products & initiatives at CloudBees, including product reimaginings of Jenkins and CloudBees Core. I’d work with him again in a heartbeat!
John’s ability to generate market insights, his design intuition, and his vision for the future helped us mold a best-in-class product competing with teams orders of magnitude larger. I was consistently impressed by John’s ability to wear a multiple of hats simultaneously.
Work history
I’ve worked with SaaS businesses on Storefront & Website Builders (Elastic Path Studio), User Feedback Tools (UserVoice), Membership Management (MemberHub), Sports Team Management (Teamworks), Developer Tools (CloudBees Jenkins), and AI Tools (Launchable and Opine).
Mar 2023 – Oct 2024
Director, Product at Elastic Path
While at Elastic Path I oversaw the integration of Elastic Path Studio (formerly Unstack) with the core Elastic Path services. This created an easy to use Storefront builder for Elastic Path. This was the main point of the acquisition.
While Studio consumed much of my focus, I also joined and led the Product-Lead growth team collaborating with Marketing to launch multiple landing pages and a revamped developer site. During this time we saw a 6x improvement converting website visitors to free trial signups.
I also collaborated with the design team on a design system to unify the design language across products.
Apr 2021 – Mar 2023
Director of Product & Design at Unstack
After using Unstack at Launchable for the website, I fell in love with the product, saw they had an opening for Head of Product, and just had to submit my application. To my great delight I was hired to direct product and design.
At Unstack, I oversaw the creation of a Shopify Landing Pages app, revamped the page builder and style guide, and contributed numerous ideas for improving the component system and CMS capabilities. We worked particularly hard to make our no-touch onboarding experience top notch, and had over 600 installs before Unstack was acquired by Elastic Path.
Feb 2020 – Apr 2021
Principal Product Designer & Co-founder at Launchable
Joined up with two of Kohsuke Kawaguchi and Harpreet Singh to create Launchable. Launchable is AI tool that greatly reduces the time required for automated tests to run. On paper my role was Principle Product Designer, but since it was a small team I also created much of the marketing and sales collateral and collaborated with product on the vision. I oversaw the initial design of the application and worked closely with the Engineering team on the right way to visualize improvements to the AI model. Launchable was acquired in 2024 by CloudBees!
Nov 2018 – Feb 2020
Director Product Design at Teamworks
Joined as the lead designer and coordinated work for several teams (20+ developers). During my tenure we launched Teamworks Academics, revamped the design system, and launched numerous improvements to the core product (now called Teamworks Operations).
Oct 2016 – Oct 2018
Design Manager at CloudBees
Joined as a Product Designer during a period of growth and quickly became the Design Manager. I worked on CloudBees Jenkins and DevOptics. While I was there we also acquired CodeShip and created a coherent vision for a multi-product UX. I grew the design team from 3 to 8.
Aug 2011 – Sep 2016
UX Designer at UserVoice
At UserVoice I was a coding designer implementing most of the CSS and JavaScript for my designs. While I was there I lead the design of the new feedback widget, launched a new version of the ticketing UI, and revamped the admin feedback UI. I was also one of the first hires in Raleigh, and played a key role in recruiting and organizing the Raleigh office.