Mitchell Clements

What does it take to grow a product from 0 to a $1.2 billion valuation? Or a design team from 2 to 30 members? 🚀

Here's how I drive business growth. 👇

My name is Mitch Clements, and I specialize in product vision, strategy, storytelling, and building design teams to drive business results.

With a diverse career background as a developer, product manager, and designer, I bring a unique perspective as a Product Design Leader. This multidisciplinary skillset empowers me to unite cross-functional teams to transform ambitious visions into actionable, incremental strategies, taking products from 0 to 1 and driving business metrics.

I thrive in leading companies through exponential growth while simultaneously prioritizing profitability and innovation at an enterprise level. Currently serving as a Senior Product Design Manager at nCino, I collaborate closely with the leadership team to establish the product vision and strategy for our mortgage portfolio. Overseeing 22 cross-functional teams, our collective efforts impact 1 in 3 U.S. mortgage loans, serving over 10 million users.

Additionally, I am deeply passionate about fostering the design community. I regularly speak at design conferences, spearheaded a product mentorship program connecting 500+ mentees with mentors, and regularly contribute to discussions here on LinkedIn (with an audience of 50K+ designers).

If you've made it this far, it's likely we share some common ground! Follow me on LinkedIn and learn more about my journey at mitchellclements.com. 👋

User Experience Manager

Ntelligence llc

Morgan Stanley
Worked on alignment of teams and leadership on agile practices, tooling, team behaviors, metrics, and agile maturity.

Agile Coach

Feelenials
A start-up focused on leveraging emotional feedback to improve the human condition at the workplace, school, or home. 
Advisor - Helped the team define the Product line, organize the portfolio, and plan program rollouts, using agile requirements management techniques. Helped the team adopt an iterative delivery model. Helped the organization work with potential investors by preparing the decks, organizing the demonstrations, and defining the pricing model, cost model, and product roadmaps.

Advisor

New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
I helped the organization transition to Agile. Worked with the leaders and teams to define their requirements model, team compositions, release train, cadences, and acceptance criteria, configure the tools to provide appropriate visibility across the organization and to third party vendors. Worked with the Business teams, Architecture team, Infrastructure team to define the high level epics, identify risks, and priority. Provided training to the overall organization (agile 101), leadership training, Product Owner and Team training. Helped the teams prepare for PI planning by seeding the backlog, identifying risks and dependencies and creating an initial PI plan. Worked with engineering teams to improve their sizing efforts, infrastructure team to adopt a Kanban based approach to manage the project work as well as ongoing responsibilities with legacy systems. Worked with Product Owners to help them organize their activities into immediate, near term and future. Helped the organization to create a knowledge base that provided the teams with information as well as live artifacts that could be used in Confluence and Jira.
.

Agile Coach, Scrum, Kanban, Automation Coach

Eppendorf
Used SAFe (for engineering) for a value stream consisting of application developers, embedded software developers, embedded hardware engineers, and electronics, electrical, and mechanical engineers. 

Third-party vendors, manual mechanical testing, and a limited capacity quality organization created risks that needed to be continually managed from a planning and execution perspective 

PI planning became critical to align faster software delivery cycles against longer mechanical cycles, ensure teams were coordinated locally and globally, and that purchasing and quality teams were in sync. 

Unlike software innovation that can occur late in the cycle, managing innovation phases for mechanical teams was critical due to long lead times, manual testing, integration, and validation of hardware components 

For Product teams being able to describe and validate abstract concepts needed a constant refinement of the backlog based on innovation results, delivery timeframes, and costs.  

Moving away from a project mindset (delivering everything) and adopting an incremental delivery mindset was critical for everyone, especially the mechanical teams, to get the product out early. 

Multiple legacy products and services prevent people from being fully dedicated to a specific train requiring coordination at the Program and Product level to establish available capacity and prioritize backlogs to support release schedules. 

Simultaneously, the organization had to define its agile practices and standards to align with the governance and compliance processes for the life sciences industry while defining a common working agreement on certain agile concepts such as the Requirements Model.

Agile Coach - SAFE for Engineering, Scrum, Kanban

Guardian Life Insurance 
Helped the organization to establish a Core team to help disseminate Agile concepts and practices across the organization. Worked with the team to establish an intake process for projects that abstracted the inner workings of the team, enabled planning at a higher level while taking into account the available capacity for the teams and coordinate their schedules across projects. Helped the team establish a knowledge base to create a common organization-wide understanding of key agile concepts while allowing for tailoring based on different team functions. Helped the team to identify various team capabilities from fully cross-functional product teams to specialized engineering teams. Helped the team to create different working models leveraging Scrum and Kanban. Worked closely with the team to configure Confluence and Jira to handle team level work management, requirements prioritization and documentation, alignment of test artifacts and processes with requirements artifacts. Worked with legacy teams to leverage Kanban , backlog management and team capacity to deliver in shorter and predictable cycles. Worked with the team to define new roles and responsibilities for an Agile organization and identify a transition plan, including training in the new roles. Helped with the configuration of Confluence and Jira to align with their requirements model and processes

Agile Coach SAFe, Scrum, Kanban

Syniverse
Coached DevOps and System Teams on practices, backlog management, tools selection, Acceptance Test Driven Development, Architectural Epics and Prioritization

Agile Coach - SAFe, Scrum , Kanban

Systech International
Trained and Coached organization at Portfolio, program and Team level using SAFE, Scrum, Lean

Agile Coach/Trainer, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban

Sparta Systems
Coached delivery organization in team practices, management practices, PMO practices, Product manager practices using SAFE and Scrum. Helped Infrastructure and Support teams in the use of Kanban to improve predictability and enhance their throughput. Spearheaded the transition to a Test First test automation system that was accepted by the FDA

Agile Coach, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban

BedBath
Coached agile teams delivering the organization’s most critical program. Addressed people issues, knowledge issues, and technical and management challenges. Helped at the program level to coordinate the agile delivery teams and legacy teams to deliver the company's stock ordering system.

Agile Coach, SAFe, Scrum , Kanban

Trizetto
Coached teams implementing Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Worked with Product Management, Product Owners, Line Managers, Agile Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineers, Developers and Testers to scale Agile
Helped management provide a consistent message to delivery teams and reduce interference and distractions. Helped mid-management to transition to various Agile roles. Helped line managers in impediment management and employee skill enhancement and career path realignment. Helped teams adopt Agile values and practices. I provided organization with an agile assessment approach to measure agile adoption progress

Verisk Analytics, Verisk Health, Verisk Crime
Spearheading an Enterprise Agile rollout – mentoring member companies, Sr. Management, Managers, Developers, and Specialty Teams, Defined organization's Enterprise Process Knowledge Base based on Disciplined Agile Delivery, OpenUP, Scrum, Kanban, and Lean. Led the Career Pathing project with HR to redefine titles, roles, and responsibilities for a self-organizing value-driven organization. Headed the Agile COE to formalize practices and tools used across the teams

Agile Coach - Agile Enterprise Big Picture, DaD, OpenUP, Scrum, Kanban

Razorfish: Scrum team had hit roadblocks in adopting an iterative approach. Helped them to understand actual project scope, renegotiate with the customer and creating early success by delivering a release in 3 months in time for the client's most important yearly event - EMC World.

AXA Financials: Provided a road map for a financial company to incorporate Agile practices within their CMMI framework. Introduced team to practices and tailoring needed to ensure that Agile principles could work without violating CMMI guidelines.

Publishers Clearting House: Led multiple teams to turn failing projects around and successfully deliver early by re-prioritizing user stories, adjusting scope with Product Owners, improving team collaboration, identifying and rectifying practices that were roadblocks to success, and working with auxiliary teams to adapt and support the core team with incremental delivery.

Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Scrum, Kanban, CMMi-5 

American Federation of Teachers
Responsible for the transformation to a business centric IT 2.0 organization that uses Agile project delivery processes while leveraging Web 2.0 architecture. Introduced Agile processes and RAD frameworks to facilitate a low cost rapid delivery/change environment.  

Worked with CIO to shape the vision, with the project managers to move towards an iterative delivery model, with the development teams to utilize and adopt a lean SDLC, and with the business team to identify and procure COTS solutions to facilitate rapid delivery of their solutions.  Introduced the organization to the benefits of cloud computing.  Developed a plan for the migration of the organization to a ‘cloud’ based information model.

Consultant

KidzIdeazTECH

UPDATE - Nate joined Uber as a developer when he turned 18.
Helping my son in his efforts to make computer science cool. He launched KidzIdeazTECH when he was 13 years old and built a radical learning system that uses incremental, vocational project-based learning that has no teachers, classrooms, or exams. His kids ( 9 - 18 yrs)  use current technologies to build real-world applications.  

His service is completely free for kids and is online. Kids do not need costly computers and can work from home, the library, office, or school using any computer. The entire learning system is managed by kids. No adults are allowed in.

The kids are ultra-agile, and collaborate extensively but build fast. Kids form a team of up to six, select a real-world problem, identify solutions, break it into a series of challenges, and incrementally deliver to MVP and MMP. Experienced kids share their knowledge and experience with junior kids. They learn much more than coding - creativity, collaboration, leadership, teamwork, communication, project management as well as how to take a product to market and support it. This includes creating the information sites and social media campaigns, as well as hosting the apps.

Chief Instigator

Cyber Korp

Tasked with refocusing the organization's goals. Though IT technology is the primary space that the company will continue to be in, our new offerings will be focused on process over technology.
Software as a technology is maturing in leaps and bounds. While the industry is eager to adopt these new technologies (due to reduced costs and enormous flexibility),  it is lagging behind in the adoption of   modern development processes 
We are focused on helping organizations create business value from technology by adoption of modern processes such as Agile and Lean

CSO & SVP - Professional Services

Valtech

Worked on a cutting edge concept to enable application user's in each state of the US to change and control the flow and behavior of the application based upon the rules for that state
Utilized an XML only approach to manage data for the web application. Data from a browser was sent as xml, processed as xml and was persisted as xml in a OO database. Used xindiche as the xml repository.Used a server based excel file product to manage user changes to application computations and formulas.
Worked on the first outsourced project with a team in India. Requirements gathering, A & D were onshore and development was offshore.

Prinicipal Consultant

Hertz
Mentored a team of developers, project managers in managing and developing Enterprise Software using Java. Mentored the team on Agile practices such as Scrum TDD, pair programming and backlog management.
Being able to motivate the team to move from an individualistic programming approach to a highly collaborative and interactive culture was a great experience.
Collective code ownership and 'letting go of your code'  became more meaningful with the introduction of TDD and continuous integration. The ability to quickly establish the impact of a change in the code base due to CI along with an extensive unit tests suite changed the culture and allowed for a more agile and nimble approach to change management.
Using a collaborative approach was invaluable to a team adopting a new technology and language. Being able to depend on each other and collaborate extensively allowed the team to overcome the many challenges when adopting a new technology

Consultant/Mentor - Agile,Java

DigitalESP

Primarily worked with Financial companies on various internal projects. Was part of the team that built a web services based online auto loan application system for a large financial client . 
The project was unique in that it heavily leveraged web services to retrieve pertinent information. From a Project Delivery perspective, 5 different organizations were involved in the system, each contributing a web service with my team responsible for aggregating all the services.

Blueshift Inc.

Software solutions: Developed an Internet Kiosk System for use at public locations such as airports. 

Developed an EDI-XML converter in C++  that was a first in the Mortgage Industry allowing organizations to begin XML based transmissions mandated by partners such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without having to immediately revamp their internal software applications.

Deza Design, Mumbai, India

Responsible for founding and overall management of the organization. Developed office automation and telecommunication systems that use embedded and application software. Was responsible for managing an  R&D team to develop solutions that were certified by the Department of Telecommunication. 
I was responsible for overall product design which included the design of embedded systems, embedded software, communication software, and application software. 
Was responsible for taking the company from a start-up in a garage to a development and production organization employing 40 persons.

Founder & Managing Director

X-Tech, Mumbai, India

Responsible for managing the software training programs of St. Xaviers Technical Institute for schools in Mumbai area.
Trained over 2000 students in over 25 schools in rudimentary software design and development.
Created a course book for the BASIC language
Trained post-graduate students in basic software engineering concepts

Head of the Department - Computer Service to Schools

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR)

Worked in the Special Microwave Unit on the Muzzle Velocity project,  building a radar for the Department of Defense (DOD). Responsibilities includes the design and development of electronic phase locked loops and embedded systems using the 8085 based microprocessor unit.

Scientific Assistant

As an accomplished Agile coach dedicated to unlocking organizations' full potential, I boast extensive expertise in guiding teams to deliver exceptional results using Agile methods. My passion for mentoring motivates even the most skeptical Architects, Developers, and Testers to embrace agile and lean engineering practices and automation. With over a decade of experience driving customer-centric product development, I partner cross-functionally with Legal, Governance, Support, Marketing, and Sales to iteratively deliver value. My unique strengths in transforming HR help organizations adopt servant leadership and self-organized team models that thrive in Agile environments.

I adeptly lead organizations through transformations utilizing frameworks like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), OpenUP, Disciplined Agile Delivery, Scrum, Kanban, and Lean Startup. With experience across industries like Finance, Media, Engineering, and Life Sciences, I have guided startups to large enterprises in adopting Agile, Lean, and automation to deliver exceptional outcomes.

Leveraging my depth of practical AI experience, I expertly guide clients to implement innovative AI solutions tailored to their needs. My proven blend of Agile fluency, transformation skills, and a people-first mindset unlocks high performance. My expertise spans Corporate Strategy, Portfolio/Project Management, Software Engineering, Product Management, Business Development, and Vendor Management.

I am dedicated to catalyzing organizations to achieve their fullest potential as an Agile transformation leader.

taplio

The Battle

Mitchell Clements

Brian D'Souza

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?