I build software businesses: yours and mine.

I am a designer, developer, and product manager who has spent thirty years turning complicated ideas into things that work. I partner with founders to take a concept to a fundable MVP, handling design and development end to end, with the same execution I use on my own ventures.

From clay to code

Before the thirty years in technology, there was clay.

I started throwing pots as a teenager at a small boarding school in Arizona, went on to earn a B.F.A. in Ceramics, and spent about a decade as a working potter. It sounds like a strange run-up to a career in software, but ceramics is unusually good training for it. A potter has to learn chemistry for glazes, physics for kiln firing, masonry to build the kiln, carpentry for the studio, and enough business sense to sell the work. Nobody hands you a specialist. You learn the whole system or the pots don't happen.

That is the habit I brought to technology: look at the entire thing, and design form and function together from the beginning.

When I moved into tech, I did it the same way. Before WordPress existed, I ran a business building custom CMS websites for small businesses in Mendocino and Lake counties in Northern California, hosting them myself on colocated servers I maintained in a local ISP's data center.

Twenty-six years inside a bank

That small venture is what landed me the job leading UX for a brand-new commercial online banking portal at Wells Fargo.

I stayed twenty-six years. I started as a banker in Ukiah, moved into UX, then digital marketing, then product management and enterprise innovation. Along the way I managed a team of fifteen designers and researchers, built a design system used across thirty financial applications, ran platforms serving a quarter of a million employees, and spent a lot of time in rooms with Legal, Risk, and Compliance.

That last part turned out to be the education. I got good at problems people had already decided were unsolvable, usually because solving them required satisfying a customer, a business objective, and a wall of regulatory constraint at the same time. Most people treat that wall as the reason something cannot be done. I found it more interesting to treat it as the shape of the solution.

Parallel pursuits

Running alongside the corporate career was a fifteen-year exploration of the tiny house movement. I taught myself architectural 3D modeling, published books on small-house design, and built an audience of a few hundred thousand people from a standing start, with no institutional backing and no advertising.

I mention it because it is the clearest evidence I have that I can build something people actually want, on my own, and keep it alive for fifteen years.

What I do now

I work with early-stage founders as a fractional product and technical lead, or as the person who builds the MVP. Zero to one, mostly, and increasingly with AI in the build rather than around it.

The work usually looks like one of these:

Zero-to-one execution. Architecting and building production-ready applications, fast, using AI development partners.
Fractional product leadership. Setting direction and acting as player-coach until you can hand off to your own engineering team.
Technical due diligence. Getting a codebase, architecture, and documentation ready to survive investor scrutiny.
Compliance foundations. Building auditable data pipelines from day one, for teams headed into regulated markets.

Writing

I am also writing about what artificial intelligence is doing to knowledge work.

The short version: AI dissolves the routine parts of cognitive work quickly, which leaves judgment, ambiguity, the ability to read people, and the ability to tell a true sentence from a merely plausible one as the things that hold their value. I think that changes what we should be teaching, what we should be hiring for, and what most organizations are currently measuring.

I published a novel in 2025, Symbiosis Rising, about a genuine partnership between people and an emerging machine intelligence. The nonfiction book I wrote alongside it is being rewritten, because the argument got better after I published it.

Where I am

Greater Sacramento, Northern California. Janzen Works LLC was founded in 2026.

If you are building something and want a second opinion before you commit to a direction, I am easy to reach.