Building & Leading Product for Impact
Helping mission-driven leaders turn bold visions into tangible outcomes—faster. Whether building tools from the ground up or scaling existing platforms, I bring a calm, strategic hand to complex challenges. My work centers on enabling teams to move with clarity, build with empathy, and measure what truly matters: meaningful outcomes for the people they serve
Vision
Creating product visions that start with purpose—clarifying the “why” so teams can build with focus, empathy, and measurable impact. It’s about connecting the mission to meaningful outcomes, and turning big goals into clear, actionable paths forward.
Strategy
Defining product strategy by translating vision into clear, practical steps—mapping how we’ll achieve ambitious goals with focus, flexibility, and the right balance of speed and sustainability. It's about building what's needed now, while laying the groundwork for what's next.
Leadership
Leading with clarity and empathy—building trust across teams, aligning stakeholders, and guiding change with a steady hand. Whether it's shaping culture, navigating complexity, or helping teams grow into their best work, my leadership centers on purpose, people, and progress.
Story
Building Family Link: Leading with Empathy, Driving Impact
Family Promise is the nation’s leading nonprofit addressing the crisis of family homelessness, with a bold goal: triple the number of families served annually—from 25,000 to 75,000—within five years. Reaching that scale required more than effort; it demanded better tools to help frontline staff make faster, more informed, and more compassionate decisions.
As a fractional Head of Product, I was tasked with building a national case management system and data platform to enable these decisions. At the time, Family Promise’s 180+ Affiliates relied on fragmented tools, disconnected processes, and siloed data. There was no unified way to track outcomes, identify what worked, or scale best practices.
The product we built, Family Link is designed to change that—bringing together data, insights, and case management into one platform to enable smarter decisions and drive greater impact.
Turning Action Into Outcomes
Family Link is more than just a case management tool—it’s a system for driving impact. Affiliates across the country use it to track the services they provide, manage family cases, and generate insights about what’s working (and what’s not). And that’s the real power: it gives caseworkers and leaders the ability to see how their engagement directly impacts family outcomes.
It closes the loop between action and impact. If a housing support program is consistently helping families stabilize faster, that insight is now visible—and can inform decisions to invest more in it. If certain services aren’t moving the needle, that too becomes clear.
It’s about using data not just to report, but to respond.
Leading with Focus, Empathy, and Fractional Hours
As a fractional leader (working 15 hours per week), I was able to guide the vision, build a lean and high-performing team, and lead the development of Family Link on lightweight, low-cost technology enabled by Google for Nonprofits, Google Appsheet, and Google Cloud. We rolled out a national MVP in under six months, with a scalable onboarding and support model designed to meet Affiliates where they are.
We didn’t try to solve everything at once. Instead, we focused on what would help families fastest:
Tools that reduce administrative load for caseworkers
Real-time views of family progress and engagement
A unified data platform to identify and share what works
And we did it in a way that was cost-effective for the organization—freeing up resources that could go back into programs, not overhead.
Designing Tech That’s Rooted in People
One thing I’ve learned is that tech only matters if it meets people where they are. Family Link was built with empathy—for the caseworkers juggling too much, for the Affiliate leaders making tough budget choices, and for the families navigating incredibly hard situations.
We made sure the platform was intuitive, mobile-friendly, and flexible—so teams could spend more time creating connections with families, and less time in spreadsheets or paperwork.
And because we tied every part of the system back to outcomes, users can actually see how their efforts translate into progress for the families they support. That connection is motivating. It’s energizing. It helps teams stay focused on what matters most.
A Model for Mission-Led Growth
Choosing a fractional model gave Family Promise the strategic leadership they needed—without the cost of a full-time exec. And it allowed me to bring in just the right level of support, right when it was needed.
Together, we built more than just a platform—we built a shared system of care and insight. Family Link now gives Affiliates the ability to not only help families in real time, but to learn and evolve their services based on what those families actually need to thrive.
This kind of work reminds me why I do what I do. It’s not just about efficiency or technology. It’s about building the right things—at the right time—with people who care deeply about the outcomes.
And for Family Promise, those outcomes are everything. More stability. More hope. More families finding their way forward.
“Working with Jonathan as a fractional leader has been transformative... he delivered the tool within six months and continues to manage the product, team, budget, change management, and onboarding to enable our Affiliates.
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