About

Passionate about building better products, I love delivering innovative product solutions and experiences that people love. 

We’re in the product and people business – with a track record of bringing cross-functional teams together and getting to product-market fit, most often it about inspiring teams to design the right things and then design them right is the fastest way to innovating the next game changing product. 

Stack hands, work through those messy, complex problems, then ship and learn. 

(in that order!)

My experience spans 15+ years across international and Silicon Valley markets, where I have developed a diverse and professional expertise in building exceptional digital products and experiences that people love. I find great joy in cultivating teams and organizational cultures where contributors and partners can thrive, while delivering measurable business results.

As a leader, I am accredited in leading and building dynamic, high-performing teams through lean UX, Agile principles, OKR, and a PDLC approach. My experience spans across various leadership roles, including as an individual contributor, manager, player, and coach. I excel in delivering successful results in both collocated, hybrid, and remote working environments. 

I currently work client side at Charles Schwab, a leading multinational financial services company offering brokerage, banking, investing and related services including consulting, and wealth management advisory services to both retail and institutional clients. I currently reside outside of San Francisco, California with my two kids and wife. When I’m not busy working, traveling or doing the occasional guest speaking I can be found running up a dirt trail, being a dad, doing some. small batch coffee roasting or getting myself lost in a bit of fine art.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/szimelka

Current interests:

The impact of ChatGPT, Midjourney, GPT4, LLM’s and disruptive technologies in general 

Company Transformation

The impact of measurement – Data and Product Design

Product Management and Product Market Fit

UX and Systems

Scaling and optimizing products and high performing teams

Innovation  

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Designing Better Products, Better Decisions, Better Organizations – AI is a powerful capability, not a strategy. Lasting competitive advantage comes from making better decisions, creating exceptional customer experiences and building organizations that learn faster than their competitors.

I'm a designer by trade and a systems thinker by instinct. Design is still my first love, because at its core it's about understanding people and solving problems that matter. Over time, that foundation has grown into product strategy, organizational design, brand and team building.

My career has moved across countries and disciplines: customer experience and digital product design in Europe, creative and technology leadership in Silicon Valley, enterprise transformation in financial services. Along the way, I've built products, experiences and teams across financial services, enterprise technology and consumer brands.

Before the current generative AI wave, I led teams building conversational AI skills and voice experiences across Alexa devices. That work left me with a belief I still hold: technology earns its value by helping people understand something more clearly — not by being impressive on its own.

Today I partner with executive and delivery teams to rethink how products get conceived, built and adopted, from early strategy through delivery and scale. Increasingly, that means helping organizations use AI deliberately — as a tool for better decisions and more adaptive teams, not a replacement for either.

Great design still begins with empathy. Technology changes; the people at the center of every decision don't. My job is to help organizations build products worth valuing, and teams capable of improving on their own.

To the next chapter!