I make
hard things
feel simple.

Product leader at Capital One, making auto-loan servicing simpler with AI.

I grew up fixing things.

TJ Saenz

At 10, in a small farming town in South Texas, I fixed whatever the neighbors brought over.

That curiosity has taken me from working with ship captains to building banking products. I still start by talking to the people who use what I’m building.

Work.

Capital One

2025–Now

Senior Manager, Product

Auto Servicing

Own the funded-loan experience in the Capital One app, used by millions, moving resolution out of the call center and into customers’ own hands.

  • Manage the product managers who own servicing for refinance and dealer-originated loans.
  • Launching live agent chat and LLM intent classification that route each customer to a vetted resolution.
  • Defining the roadmap for agentic actions on the highest-volume reasons customers call.

Auto Refinance

2025–26

Grew the acquisition engine behind a 50% run-rate expansion in 15 months, at the U.S. market leader in auto refinance.

  • Led three full-stack pods: onboarding and entry UI, credit decisioning infrastructure, and marketing data.
  • Monthly applications up 74% through contextual multi-armed bandit marketing, new channels, and A/B-tested entry redesigns.
  • Shipped Capital One’s first real-time NPV loan decisioning: over a hundred scored models aggregated into one relative NPV prediction.
  • Placed 2nd of 300+ in Capital One’s Dallas AI competition with an AI requirements assistant (90% user-story accuracy, 4x faster development), and trained ~60 VP+ leaders on AI fundamentals.

CBRE

2023–25

Director, Product

Sustainability Platform

Took a global sustainability platform from zero to one: $2B+ in ARR contracts in its first year.

  • Built and managed a team of four product managers, owning vision, roadmap, and go-to-market.
  • Doubled market share in ESG data products with flexible APIs, shaped by market trend analysis and enterprise UX research.
  • Built an XGBoost model in Python on Snowflake that predicted facility equipment replacement by lead time, which ended inventory disruptions.

Nautilus Labs

2022–23

Senior Technical Product Manager

Voyage Optimization

Owned the P&L for fleet performance products at a maritime startup whose clients included the world’s third-largest maritime company.

  • Launched route optimization from zero to one, recommending speeds and routes that burned less fuel.
  • Led customer empathy sessions onsite with ship captains.

Paycom

2021–22

Product Manager

Time Management

Owned the Time and Attendance suite at Paycom: the scheduling, timecard, and compliance tools enterprise clients run payroll on.

  • Unlocked $3.5M in ARR by releasing a new feature that automated time-off approvals.
  • Streamlined the agile process across QA, UX, and engineering, improving throughput by 30%.

Sendero Consulting

2018–21

Insurance Marketplace

2020–21

Consultant

Led product for an AI-driven insurance marketplace at a top health insurer, matching individuals, families, and small businesses to coverage that fit.

  • Grew online revenue 7x by using market analysis to decide where AI and ML went into the product.

Epic EHR Implementation

2018–20

Associate Consultant

Owned hardware readiness for Baylor Scott & White’s Epic rollout, so go-live held in every ward, from the ER to the OR.

  • Built a ServiceNow-fed dashboard that tracked in real time which hardware could run Epic, replacing a mountain of manual checks.

How I work.

01

Data is a compass, not a GPS

Data points you at the problem. Conversations tell you what it means. When the two disagree, dig in, because one of them is lying. After Shaun Clowes, on Lenny’s Podcast.

02

Averages are where insight goes to die

Every change helps some customers and stings others in ways the topline never shows. Both are hiding inside that tidy number.

03

Ship the smallest thing that can be wrong

My best calls were bets small enough that being wrong cost a week. The ones that hurt were the ones I made big, because they felt certain.

Coaching.

I coach product managers through the moves that are hardest to make alone: the promotion case, the job change, the first time managing people. And I work with a small number of teams part-time, on the problems where an outside read is worth more than another headcount.

Say hello.

Have something in mind? I’d love to hear about it.

contact@tjsaenz.com

LinkedIn Writing