# Jan Simmala > Building performance wellbeing | 10 years designing products Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jansimmala After 10 years of designing innovative products, I’m shifting gears and moving to building them myself. Current focus: Performance wellbeing. Most founding teams optimize everything except themselves, like optimizing for product, growth, and capital. But rarely are they proactive in optimizing their own operating rhythm. When that slips, business outcome slips. I’m building toward a proactive actions that helps founding teams sustain clarity and momentum under pressure. Early days, building in public. If this feels relevant, let’s talk. Pivoted from pre-therapy prep → founder-mentor/advisor matchmaking → performance wellbeing. The through line is using wellbeing as a foundation to success. ## Work Experience ### Founder @ Holding Space AI Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Exploring how optimizing performance wellbeing leads to better business outcomes. There’s a split right now: productivity systems that ignore the human, and wellness practices that only work when you have spare capacity. I’m interested in integrating both: bringing the humanist into productivity. Pivoted from pre-therapy prep → founder-mentor/advisor matchmaking. What I learned: people need continuous support embedded in their operating rhythm. Now building in public and talking to founding teams about what it would look like to make wellbeing a proactive foundation for sustainable performance. Open to conversations with others thinking in this direction. ### Creative Entrepreneur @ Jan Simmala Art Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Collect colorful, structurally whimsical fine art at: jansimmalaart.store • Business Development: Turned a solo fine art practice into a working business, developing product lines, testing pricing strategies, and selling directly to customers at art shows and markets. • Content Creation & Marketing: Created consistent social media content, email newsletters, website copy, and promotional materials by applying product marketing principles to grow and engage a creative business. ### Principal Product Designer @ Lightship Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 Lightship is a B2B2C tech-enabled service company that provides clinical research solutions to help pharma companies run hybrid clinical trials. • Unified User Experiences: Partnered with the CPO and product managers to design a comprehensive product and service ecosystem, ensuring a seamless and unified experience for both external and internal users. • User Research: Synthesized qualitative insights from user interviews and usability tests into actionable opportunities for increasing engagement. ### Lead Designer & Product Marketing @ Tag.bio Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 Tag.bio is a data science and AI startup that helps pharma & healthcare organizations build a data mesh platform so that they can productize their data. • Significantly Increased Sales Qualified Leads: Helped secure contracts with big companies by collaborating with the CEO, marketing, and sales team to refine messaging and positioning, write case studies, and create pitch decks. • Unified Customer Experience: Increased engagement by redesigning the company’s brand, marketing, and sales assets to be unified across channels. • Growth Experiments: Increased lead conversion by running experiments such as A/B tests and multivariate tests on website, email, and ad campaigns. ### Senior Product Designer @ Wanda Inc. Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 Wanda is a B2B2C healthtech startup providing a predictive remote patient monitoring solution to reduce hospital readmissions. • Unified User Experiences: Led a comprehensive redesign initiative to unify patients' and clinicians' experiences, such as redesigning the patient app and developing a design system, resulting in an enhanced user experience. • Expanded On Product Features: Acted as a PM to ship new product features, such as reporting, to help clinicians manage their workflows. • Mentorship: Mentored two interns on user research and UX design by preparing work to be completed, reviewing their work and giving constructive feedback. ### UX-UI Designer @ IQVIA Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 • Transitioned the department from traditional design thinking to digital design thinking by introducing agile design process. • Helped Directors and VPs strategize on new product ideas and created proofs of concept to get buy-ins. • Developed project managers to become product managers through education on design process and delegation of product management responsibilities, such as staying focused on the big picture. • Drove UX strategies and approaches that balanced the needs of end users (patients and healthcare professionals) and customers (biopharma companies) with business objectives. • Consistently met tight deadlines for projects (2-5 projects ranging from small to large size at any given time) by standardizing UX and UI processes, creating a design system, and iterating rapidly. • Led and owned product design, working in multidisciplinary teams and independently to conduct research, gather requirements, design interactive wireframes and prototypes for: - 7 new proof of concept product offerings to gain buy-ins from internal stakeholders and external clients. - 3 standard product offerings that are reusable for multiple clinical trials. - Multiple projects relating to digital health and clinical trials for biopharma companies and internal teams. • Accelerated onboarding process for team members by providing clear user journey and detailed prototype. • Represente 3 teams (UX, UI and frontend teams) for the Integrated Solutions’s process improvement to reduce delivery timeline (there were 13 sub-teams involved overall) while initiating process improvement process for the 3 teams to unify product offerings. ### UI Designer & Developer @ IQVIA Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 • Taught developers how to develop responsive email templates. • Delegated projects and tasks to fellow developers and a designer. • Improved design quality for responsive websites and emails by prototyping for different viewpoints as well as performing quality assurance using Pivotal Tracker, Browserstack, and Litmus. • Met tight deadlines project by standardizing user flows, design and development processes for websites and emails. • Enhanced scalability for patient recruitment websites by creating a base and reusable elements for future clinical trials. • Reduced frontend development delivery timeline by using MVC framework and creating Bootstrap pattern library to store code snippets for multiple reusable elements. • Collaborated with multiple stakeholders and shareholders to stay align with business and users’ goals. ### Web Developer @ Flipeleven Creative Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 • Increased productivity by quickly learning different web development tools and languages in order to build different types of website for the agency’s clients. • Improved agile web development with limited design directions by communicating with designers, developers, project managers and clients to prioritize features and create reusable elements. • Ensured quality of websites and email templates by performing quality assurance, such as making sure that the functionalities work across all browsers and that emails are displayed correctly for all email clients (for all screen sizes as well: desktop, tablets, mobiles). ### House Manager @ UW-Milwaukee: Peck School of the Arts Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Peck School of the Arts • Communicated with the events’ directors/stage managers in an ongoing manner to create smooth opening, transitioning and closing of the shows. • Worked in teams and independently to prepare spaces for upcoming/shows. • Trained assistant house managers about procedures to accomplish before, during and after the shows. • Assigned assistant house managers and ushers to different tasks, such as managing latecomers. • Kept directors, stage managers and audience (up to 500 people) happy by promptly responding to their requests, such as quick transitions during shows and resolving ticket/seating arrangements. ### Co-Chair of the AOC Web Site Committee and Office Assistant @ UW-Milwaukee: Peck School of the Arts Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | Academic Opportunity Center -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ***Co-Chair of the AOC Web Site Committee:*** -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- • Designed the department’s logo. • Redesigned, developed and maintained the department’s website. • Proposed idea developments, managed suggestions, and resolved conflicting ideas among colleagues and supervisors regarding visual communications. • Wrote tutorials and taught staff about HTML/CSS functions. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ***Office Assistant:*** -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- • Raised the department’s professional appearance by adding modern touches while designing brochures, PowerPoint presentations and bulletin boards by using Adobe and Microsoft products. • Improved file organization for easier maintenance by creating and implementing standards. • Trained staff and students about technology functions, such as retrieving misplaced data and maintaining desktop efficiency. • Addressed concerns/answering questions from students and parents regarding the program’s mission, purpose and classes. • Prepared reports on students’ academic records for the Director and advisors. ### Web Design/Developer Volunteer @ UW-Milwaukee: Peck School of the Arts Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 Redesigned and developed the program’s website: www.uwm.edu/letsci/studentservices/saass ### Data Input Volunteer @ American Red Cross Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Milwaukee, WI Entered, updated and maintained donors’ donations and contact information in the data managing system, Raiser’s Edge. ### Designing Intern @ Aspects Furniture Manufacturing Inc. Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | Chino, CA • Collaborated in designing the company’s binder cover by initiating ideas and preparing files for printing. • Perfected furniture photos for advertising needs by fixing ordinary photos to look like studio photos: www.aspectsfurniture.com/products.htm. ### Designing Intern @ Norasack Design Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | Alexandria, VA • Designed fun and modern logos, a banner, and a pamphlet for the Laotian community. • Increased viewers’ attraction at the Laotian Exhibition in the Asian Festival, D.C. 2009 by researching and creating informative visual presentations in an interactive manner to educate the viewers about the country’s history and tourist destinations. ## Education ### Information Technology Management University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee ### Supply Chain and Operations Management University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee ### Shorewood High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jan-simmala - Portfolio: http://www.jansimmala.com/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/jansimmala JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jansimmala/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13