I'm Jeff Mielke, a UX leader. For two decades I've walked into sprawling, ambiguous product spaces — a 21-product org at Google, a network of food and travel brands, a startup with no product team at all — and left behind focused journeys, healthy teams, and numbers that moved.
The through-line
Most teams are drowning in goals. I find the two or three journeys that actually matter, get every stakeholder to agree on them in writing, and put everything else in the parking lot — on purpose, and out loud.
Baselines, not opinions. Max/diff surveys re-run every six months, research bites instead of forty-page reports, A/B testing paired with qualitative work — so the team always knows whether it's winning.
Strategy dies without a healthy org. I design teams, rituals, and critique culture so good thinking survives contact with reality — and so people are still standing at the end of it.
Selected work
The case studies are password-protected — they contain client metrics and colleague feedback. Ask me for access and I'll send it over.
Google Cloud · Sr. UX Manager
AI-powered features for Database Center. Generative Views lets an operator describe the view they need and Gemini builds it — then a testing agent simulates the impact of a recommended change on latency, IOPS or throughput before anyone applies it in production. Because trust, not accuracy, decides whether a recommendation gets used.
Google · Sr. UX Manager
An 80-person org across New York and Munich, 21 products, and a pandemic rewriting the problem every quarter. We built on top of Meet, Gmail, Chat and Calendar to fix three things Googlers actually felt: nowhere to meet, no sense of connection, and no boundary between work and life.
Home Connect · Design Director, 8th Light
A first-time founder, a fixed budget, ten third-party integrations, and a five-person team with no PM and no AI experience. I ran product strategy, research and design at once — and coached the team through rapid prototyping to a launch on iOS, Android and web.
Food Network & Food.com · UX Director, Scripps
Food Network was a marketing site with too many goals. Cooks arrived from Google, took a recipe, and left. We cut to two journeys, rebuilt the architecture around them, and designed a suite spanning web, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and Android.
Travel Channel · UX Director, Scripps
When Anthony Bourdain left Travel Channel, the Layover app was about to become obsolete. We broadened it into an immersive itinerary builder drawing on the whole network's content — and made the interface get out of the way of the photography.
iVerify · UX Designer & Design Lead
A security product built almost entirely by engineers and a founder, with no UX and no front-end hires in sight. I evolved the brand, cut the design down to its core tasks, and produced the site and marketing films that had to earn trust from a suspicious audience.
Flourish · Sr. UX Advisor
Advised on a focused, usable and quietly playful experience — the central question being how much humanity to keep in the loop when the technology is doing the listening. myflourish.ai
Games
JeffImagines is my indie studio — five iOS games I design, build and release end to end. The same convictions apply, with nobody to delegate them to: no ads mid-play, no energy timers, no pay-to-skip. Difficulty is a feature, not a paywall.
Navigate invisible mazes through touch and vibration.
There's nothing to see — just a dark screen and a marble you can feel. Every wall is a buzz, every path a rhythm.
$0.99 · no ads, no IAP
Become the ultimate amphibian acrobat.
Touch, drag and fling your frog across a swamp of weather-dressed hazards — umbrella bees, night-vision moths, one very unbothered crocodile.
Free for a limited time · no ads, no IAP
The mobile puzzle game that respects you.
Hop across sinking pads, toggle bridges and dodge snakes to reach every goal in order — clean puzzle logic across snow, moonlight and glowing caves.
18+ levels · free campaign
Seven puzzles. One sharper brain.
A calm, paper-warm bundle of seven cognitive games — cryptograms, memory grids, reaction drills, mental math — built as a quiet ritual, not another notification.
No ads mid-puzzle, no dark patterns
Master the art of containment before time runs out.
Draw neon barriers to corral escapees before they breach the perimeter, as colour-coded rule-breakers, bombs and a relentless Warden escalate the chaos.
Game Center leaderboards · free, no ads
What colleagues say
Jeff led the team through a massive pivot of priorities and requirements. Overnight he had to understand and switch focus on new priorities caused by COVID remote work. He set up clear processes on how to analyze new requirements and user pain points and led the team through this transformation.
Through Jeff's leadership and his ability to lead with humility and transparency, he and his co-lead were able to pull off the impossible — a highly complex cross-org alignment resulting in a smooth product launch with a user satisfaction that many other teams and products can only dream of.
I'm consistently in awe at his ability to be an effective lead for all types of UX disciplines, while creating great team dynamics and growth opportunities for each and every team member.
A true designer at heart, Jeff leads teams to create compelling and groundbreaking products for any device. Jeff is a true user advocate while balancing business needs. I'd love the chance to partner with him again.
Get in touch
That's usually where I'm most useful. I'm open to design leadership roles and advisory work.