I make hard things feel simple.
Hi! I'm TJ. I'm a product leader at Capital One, building AI that helps people solve loan problems right in the app.
A little about me
My "career" started at age 10, in a small farming town in South Texas, fixing whatever the neighbors dropped off that wasn't working. I doubt anyone I work with today thinks of me as the neighborhood computer kid, but it still comes out in how I approach the job: something's confusing, someone's stuck, and you get to hand it back working.
Every domain I've worked in turned out to be asking the same question: why is this harder than it needs to be? The answer looks different in maritime shipping than it does in consumer banking, but you get there the same way every time. Understand the customer, find the messy problem, make it feel simple. These days my team at Capital One is asking that question about loan servicing, while AI reshapes the tools we use to answer it.
If I've learned one thing across all of it, it's that the best products don't come from better frameworks. They come from actually talking to users.
Experience.
Auto Servicing
When something goes wrong with your loan, you should not have to sit on hold. My teams build the servicing experience in the Capital One app: live agent chat, AI that understands what you actually need, and automation that increasingly just handles it. Same job as ever. Find the friction, remove it.
Auto Refinance
Refinancing a car loan should take minutes, not weeks. I led the product pods behind onboarding, credit decisioning, and marketing, shipping real-time loan decisioning and entry experiences that made refinancing dramatically easier to start and finish.
Sustainability Platform
Enterprises made big sustainability promises with no tooling to keep them. I built and led the product team that took a global sustainability platform from zero to one, from first pitch to enterprise contracts around the world.
Voyage Optimization
Ocean shipping runs on intuition and an enormous amount of fuel. We built machine learning tools that recommended better speeds and routing for commercial fleets: less fuel, fewer emissions, better margins on every voyage. Turns out even a small efficiency gain matters a lot when the asset is a 300-meter ship.
Time Management
Nobody loves time tracking. Not employees, not managers, and definitely not payroll. I worked on Paycom's Time Management suite: scheduling, timecards, and compliance tooling that made an unloved workflow faster and harder to get wrong.
Insurance Marketplace
Shopping for insurance is confusing enough that a lot of people just give up. We built an AI-driven marketplace for HealthMarkets that asked plain questions and matched individuals, families, and small businesses with coverage that actually fit.
Epic EHR Implementation
Hospital billing confuses people because the data behind it is a mess. I worked on an Epic implementation for Baylor Scott & White that cleaned up how claims went to insurers and gave patients a world-class app for getting at their own records. The piece I owned was a dashboard, fed by ServiceNow, that tracked in real time which hardware had been upgraded to run Epic. It replaced a mountain of manual checking, and on go-live day Epic came up everywhere it had to, from the ER to the OR to the waiting room.
Principles.
Data is a compass, not a GPS
You can run the numbers or you can talk to customers, and the answer is both. Data points you at the problem and keeps you honest. Conversations tell you what it actually means. When the two disagree, dig in, because one of them is lying. (I borrowed the compass line from Shaun Clowes on Lenny's Podcast. It's too good.)
Make it simple
A customer should never have to work out what their job is. Every screen should make two things obvious: what you need to do next, and why it matters. If people have to guess at either one, the product isn't finished.
Dig into the details
Averages are where insight goes to die. Every change helps some customers a lot and stings others in ways the topline never shows. The customers getting real value and the ones feeling real pain are both hiding inside that tidy number. Go find them.
Ship small, learn fast
The fastest way to find out if you're right is to put something real in front of real users. Most of my best product decisions started as a small bet I could afford to be wrong about.
“In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. It's because we're wired for story.”Brené Brown
Writing.
Say hello.
If you want to talk product, compare notes, or just ask about the computer-fixing years, my inbox is open.
Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas