Palm Desert, CA — hamer.co

I bring ideas
to life at scale.

Director of Product Design at ServiceNow. 20+ years scaling AI product design and enterprise UX across a $5B portfolio and a 22-person global team.

Director of Product Design  ·  ServiceNow  ·  $5B portfolio  ·  AI Specialist limited availability 2026  ·  20+ years

Open to VP / Head of Design roles in AI product design, enterprise UX, and scaled product organizations.

We should do
what's right.

The story starts with the work I lead now, then moves backward through the decisions, teams, and systems that made it possible. The numbers are real. The voice is mine.

Where I am now

$5B

ServiceNow ITSM: the portfolio I lead today

This is the portfolio I lead now.

I lead the design organization for one of ServiceNow's largest and most strategic product portfolios. 22 designers across the US, India, UK, and Israel. A manager-of-managers structure spanning three design managers and nineteen individual contributors. Product lines that touch thousands of enterprises worldwide.

In November 2025 I started building something ServiceNow had never built before — the L1 Service Desk AI Specialist. Not a chatbot. Not a copilot. An autonomous AI Specialist for complex enterprise service environments, built to handle end-to-end IT service requests using enterprise context, knowledge, workflow data, governed escalation paths, and human oversight when appropriate. We had a hypothesis: 90%+ autonomous resolution was achievable if the experience earned trust before it earned autonomy. Concept to limited availability in roughly five months.

"The product direction became real."

Then there's the other thing we shipped on the same day.

I served as the catalyst for ESM Foundation. I led design of the IT service desk and implementation agent workstreams that proved a new model could work. A small team at first: me, a staff designer, two PMs, building vision pieces with no mandate but a clear belief. That work transferred to a larger team. BU leadership funded it. We expanded the effort across ITSM and platform. What emerged became the blueprint adopted by HR, legal, finance, procurement, and workplace teams: ServiceNow's new offering for midsize companies that unifies enterprise services on the AI Platform and gets customers live in weeks. Introduced publicly on April 9, 2026.

Two products. One day. Two ends of the same belief: AI should do the work, not just assist with it.

I keynoted Empower 6 in November 2025 — 300+ global product, design, content, and research professionals — presenting an original Ethics in AI framework. Zero designer attrition through significant org change. 100% AI training completion across the team.

I've maintained zero designer attrition through every major reorg. Peers nominated me for the Captain EX Leadership Award for it. That's the work of building a team where people feel seen, heard, and challenged.

$5B

ITSM portfolio
under design direction

22

Designers across
four countries

90%+

Autonomous L1 resolution target
for enterprises

0

Designer attrition
through org upheaval

How I got here

$0 $1B

Employee Workflows: built from nothing

I didn't inherit this. I built it.

From 2017 to 2023 I led design across ServiceNow's Employee Workflows portfolio: HRSD, Workplace Service Delivery, and Legal Service Delivery. I scaled the HRSD design team from sole designer to 19. Built the operating model, the design standards, the team culture. The portfolio reached $1B in revenue on the strength of the product experience built under that leadership.

I reframed employee service delivery as an end-to-end journey rather than disconnected portals. That foundational shift became the conceptual backbone of the entire Employee Workflows product line. I led design of the Employee Service Center, the unified cross-department portal spanning HR, IT, Legal, and Facilities. I shipped Lifecycle Events, now a core HRSD capability across hundreds of enterprise deployments.

"In March 2020 the world stopped. We shipped in weeks."

Emergency Response and Safe Workplace apps. Shipped within weeks of COVID-19. 900+ enterprises adopted them. 9,500+ installations. Company leadership cited them as a defining moment in ServiceNow's employee workflows strategy. I called it what happens when the north star is already set before the crisis arrives.

I drove design org realignment to establish Employee Experience as a first-class business domain: dedicated design ownership rather than borrowed capacity. Sustained zero designer attrition through significant organizational change.

The operating model outlasted every organizational change thrown at it. That's not a credential. That's what infrastructure looks like.

Named inventor on multiple US patents: systems for lifecycle activity management, enterprise message templating, and targeted data delivery.

Where it started

$80M

ServiceNow HRSD: fewer than 20 customers

One designer. No process. No customers to speak of.

I joined ServiceNow in December 2016 as the sole designer on HR Service Delivery. Fewer than 20 enterprise customers. $80M in revenue. No design process. No customer engagement model. I built the first UX practice from nothing. Introduced customer engagement as a discipline. Designed the original HR portal that evolved into the Employee Service Center.

Before ServiceNow, I spent three years at Jobvite, an early design hire on a talent acquisition platform that scaled to serve Fortune 500 clients. I became Creative Director, led creative and UX across Jobvite Hire, and created Jobvite Video, a zero-to-one product in the talent acquisition space.

Before that, a decade in motion design, brand, and digital experience: Critical Mass, Outset Media, Hamer & Co. Building the craft foundation that would eventually hold a $5B portfolio.

"Twenty years of the same instinct: find the gap. Fill it. Do it right."

The career looks like a straight line from here. It didn't feel like one. It felt like grit, tenacity, patience, vision, and the right partnerships at the right moments.

How I think

The gap.

The space between what is and what should be

I build the conditions for great work. Then I hold the standard.

I bring ideas to life at scale. I dream, I do, I delegate. And I partner with the people around me to make the complex feel simple and the ambitious feel achievable. The best design decisions look inevitable in hindsight. Getting there is the work.

I create space for people to feel safe enough to share their best thinking, then I ask the questions no one else is asking. I still get into the work — catching craft details others miss, writing the comment that stops a bad decision before it ships, and using prototypes to bring everyone to the moment where the decision becomes clear.

Design at this scale is as much an organizational discipline as it is a craft. The products worth remembering — the ones that earn trust, reduce friction, and change how work gets done — emerge from teams with a clear north star and the discipline to hold it. Getting there requires knowing when to drive and when to get out of the way.

"The gap between what businesses want to deliver and what people need to feel."

Most products ship when the business is ready. The ones worth remembering ship when everyone is — business, customer, and user, all aligned, all proud of what was built. I've spent twenty years learning the difference between those two moments. And holding the line when it matters.

I don't measure success by shipping features. I measure it by the quality of the experience and outcomes that last.

We should do what's right, not right now.

What it's produced

4

Listed patents. Plus industry awards, Webbys, and company recognition.

The work has been recognized.

6

Industry awards
2017–2022

4

Webby Awards

3

Company awards

4

Patents

Company awards

ServiceNow Moonshot Award · Project Automate

Captain EX Leadership Award · People-first leadership, peer-nominated

Patents

Systems and methods for generating and transmitting targeted data within an enterprise · US10990929B2 · Issued Apr 2021

Document management · US20210026803A1 · Filed Oct 2020

Systems and methods for providing message templates in an enterprise system · US20200342408A1 · Filed Jul 2020

Lifecycle activity testing and error resolution · US20200302365A1 · Filed Mar 2019

Technology without humanity isn't progress. It's just noise.

— Kenneth James Hamer

Kenneth James Hamer

Let's build something
worth building.

If you're building something ambitious, I'd like to hear where it's headed.