Judson Abts

Every service runs three ways at once: what the rules say, what the staff actually do, and what the software lets anyone do. The problems live in the gaps. I find the gaps, build the fix as working software, and make the system show its work — who decided what, and why. I did it by hand for twenty years. Now AI holds the context. A person still signs every decision.

Hotels, a workforce platform, an energy fleet, a federal childcare benefit. Same method each time.

Selected engagements

Principal Product & Design Strategist — Vizr AI, Inc. (my firm)

A national nonprofit that runs a federal childcare benefit for military families· 2024 – present. Came in through an engineering firm (Truss) to document how the service actually ran. The organization then contracted me directly.

• Most applications came back for more documents. I read the program rules, what the coordinators did and what the software allowed against each other. The cause was timing built into the process, not careless families. So I fixed the process.
• Rebuilt the intake from the coordinators’ own checklist. Each family now sees the list for their case. A complete first submission became the norm in pilot, measured in production.
• Engaged to lead product management in 2025: vision, priorities, requirements with internal stakeholders, the backlog, and the seam between stakeholders and engineering. From 2026, UX strategy and the research practice, alongside the senior PM.
• Built the team’s AI setup. Each agent gets a short list of what it’s allowed to read, a capped set of tools and standing rules. There’s a written line on what the model isn’t trusted to decide. That stays with a person.
• Wrote acceptance criteria as plain-English test cases, then automated tests, scored per criterion. Built a proof-of-concept agent that checks delivered work against its criteria.
• Run my own prototype builds through an AI build agent under written stop conditions. Every plan gets read before it runs. Every release gets checked on the device.
• Wrote the cost, sequencing and process inputs for an executive platform decision, built so the evidence could lose.
• Hold research, design, data and QA across a dozen-plus workstreams at once. Every decision traces to a person, a quote and a result.

Principal Product Strategist — contract, via Accella

Electriq Power · Mitsubishi Power · National Urban League· 2021 – 2024

• Electriq Power (home batteries and grid services) needed investors to see the platform run, not read about it. I led the client relationship and designed the operator console: storm response, utility demand response, fleet health and price forecasting, end to end, as working software. The system recommends, the operator decides, and every event reconciles against what was requested. The company went public in 2023 and closed in 2024.
• Mitsubishi Power (TOMONI): role-based views and alert prioritization for a fleet-monitoring platform facing a thousand-plus alerts a day.
• National Urban League: the product and design concept for the Take Action app, live on iOS and Android since 2024.

Senior Product Manager — contract

Jitjatjo(on-demand workforce platform, now part of Dayforce) · 2019 – 2021. Product, solution architecture and the enterprise account for the rollout with Compass Group under a $35M agreement. Reported to the Head of Product. Led the enterprise API and core product pods.

• Six service stages: onboarding, booking, fulfillment, delivery, reconciliation, payments. Settled with Compass which ones the platform ran, which they kept and which we shared. Payroll stayed with their 300-person team on SAP.
• Designed Sync with engineering: one internal API every product calls with an organization ID, routed to each client’s systems. It replaced per-client batch jobs and took the platform from 10K to 250K addressable workers.
• Wrote the pay rules into the platform as a decision table: each rule with its compliance status, state, earnings code, logic and a worked example. Specified the payroll audit tool Compass admins used to prove the rules held.
• Wrote UAT before the build, as the spec. When Compass’s manual adjustments started producing overtime, worked with the AI team to tune the shift matcher against it.
• Enterprise onboarding went from six months to one. Revenue grew 186% through COVID. The pilot cut Compass’s labor cost 17% at 99% worker satisfaction.

Founder & Head of Product

League· 2013 – 2019 · Los Angeles. A product and design consultancy built around luxury hospitality. Mandarin Oriental was the anchor client, then Langham, Taj and smaller companies.

• Built it to $2.8M. A core team of five, specialists for the big projects (up to 39 on the largest), everything through me. Recruited our engineering lead away from his full-time job to run engineering.
• Shipped 12 products for the hotel group in 18 months, in the time agencies quoted for one. An 18% lift in non-English markets by treating localization as product work.

Senior Graphic Web Designer → UX Designer → Senior Product Manager

Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group· 2006 – 2013 · New York, then London · reported to the VP of E-commerce. Where the method started.

• Interviewed every executive with a stake, up to VP and C-level, and turned what they said into trade-offs leadership could decide between.
• Worked with Deloitte on the digital roadmap and priorities, then owned the execution across 35 hotels.
• Sent costs and value up the chain as data, with as little of my own opinion attached as I could manage.

Education

Gordon College— B.S. Political Science, 2006