Jacob Hershfield

“I've had the pleasure of working with Jake over the last two years at Axon. During this time, we were on the same product team with the primary task of completely overhauling and redesigning the Axon Redaction product. Jake has done a great job working with the product teams to get results. I was impressed with his ability to work with teams both locally and abroad (in this case Vietnam) to get complex requirements built with accuracy and precision. His focused approach to both the minutia and big picture elements of a development cycle has unquestionably become one of his strongest attributes. From a design standpoint, Jake is a fantastic collaborator who isn't afraid to propose new or different ideas. We've spent countless meetings wireframing and brainstorming at the whiteboard; this hands-on approach makes him an easy person to work with and an equally impressive design ally. Furthermore, Jake has developed a great amount of aptitude around understanding user workflows and working with design to generate compelling and viable product solutions. Jake's ability to listen to users, observe their pain-points and drive towards solutions is extremely impressive. While we both received an immense amount of feedback during our time at Axon, I always appreciated his capacity to remain focused on the product goals, synthesizing as much of the given feedback into actionable steps for the team to take. Lastly, Jake is an all-around awesome person to work with. He's a great communicator, he listens to everyone willing to share their thoughts and has become a well-respected, product-minded leader who will unquestionably continue to ship awesome things. I highly recommend Jake for any team. ”

“I managed Jake directly for a year, then indirectly as he moved to report to one of the new PM leads that joined our team later on. Throughout my time working with Jake, acting as a mentor, manager and colleague, I was always astounded by both his intellectual horsepower and willingness to do whatever it took to get the job done. He is a self-starter with crazy amounts of energy that he brings to the workplace every single day. Despite being one of the most junior members of the team initially, he was one of the people that contributed most to our team and office culture. He has a playful and friendly way about how he carries himself day to day, embracing banter and jokes with aplomb. His demeanor was infectious and it really helped grow our cutlure to one of the best PM teams I have ever worked on. From a product side, Jake has incredibly instincts on what user's want and need. He has a great knack for learning new things very quickly, which at this early stage in his career, really gives him an edge against not only someone at the same level, but even someone who would be more senior to him. It was commonplace for us to give Jake key assignments where someone who didn't know him, would have called me crazy. Jake is that good. One of his marquee projects was taking over the area of our Video Redaction product. This is a key part of Axon's portfolio, and instrumental for our law enforcement customers as they need to regularly disclose their body/car video to the public. Our legacy product was languishing, and responsible for customer dissatisfaction and has potential of negatively impacting future deals. Within 90 days, Jake had a clear direction and was shooting for the moon. Within 10 months, he completely transformed the product to be orders of magnitude better than the grenade he inherited. The entire organization, and our customer base, was thrilled with his results. From a career side, Jake joined our team initially as part of our Leadership Development Program (LDP), which is a 1-2 year rotational program at Axon where you do 3 month rotations in different parts of the organization. On his second rotation, we were fortunate to land him, and everyone recognized his talent as a PM very quickly. We offered him to extend his 3 month rotation into 1 year, then at the end of the year, we then promoted him to a full time product manager. It was one of the fastest promotion of an LDP in the company's history. That said, I recommend Jake in a heartbeat. He's fantastic and I can't wait to hire him again :) ”