Hi, I’m Jensen.
I build software, teams, and companies. Over two decades I’ve designed products used by more than a billion people and led the teams behind them—as a CTO, a CEO, and most of the roles in between.
What I love most is where design, engineering, and the customer meet. I like hard, knotty problems—the kind where the answer still has to feel simple even though the problem isn’t. That instinct is how I ended up co-founding Textio and building the team that invented AI-assisted writing back in 2014.
- 1B+ people use products I’ve designed every day
- 9 career roles, every altitude from builder to CEO
- 2014 shipped AI that created a new product category
- Over 50% of the Fortune 500 used Textio’s products
A few things I’ve made
I’ve been fortunate to have a hand in building some of the world’s most innovative and best-known software.
Though I lead large teams, I’ve never stopped building
- AI-native product & transformation
- Product, design & engineering leadership
- Zero-to-one product building
- Executive coaching & facilitation
For most of my career I’ve worked where design meets engineering, leading teams through software’s hardest, most interesting problems. I sweat the details—the gap between something that merely works and something people love using.
As a CTO and CXO I ran product, engineering, design, brand, and marketing; as CEO, the whole company. I’ve set technical direction, reset a culture, and gotten organizations moving toward something that lasts.
These days I help companies rethink how they work and build with AI, while making new products of my own. I also coach CEOs and other product and engineering leaders, and facilitate T‑groups for founders.
My speaker bio
Jensen Harris has designed and built software his entire life. In more than 15 years at Microsoft, he guided the creation of some of the most widely-used software in the world—the innovative Ribbon interface of Microsoft Office, the often-imitated redesign of Outlook, and the pioneering touch-first experience built for Microsoft Surface, which shipped on more than 200 million devices.
In 2014 he co-founded Textio and invented augmented writing, bringing AI to HR for the first time—using some of the earliest production-scale precursors of today’s LLMs, years before ChatGPT. As Textio’s first engineer, first product person, and first designer, he built the original product, then led R&D across engineering, product, design, security, and privacy. By the end of his time as CTO, hundreds of enterprises—including over a quarter of the Fortune 100—relied on Textio every day.
He went on to serve as Textio’s Chief Experience Officer and then, from 2024 to 2026, its CEO—resetting the company’s culture, reigniting product momentum, and conceiving and shipping Lavalier, an AI-native interview intelligence platform and the most ambitious software in Textio’s history. He remains a co-founder, board member, and CTO Emeritus.
Today, Jensen partners with medium and large companies to reinvent their organizations and build natively with AI, alongside building new products of his own. He coaches engineering and product leaders, facilitates T‑groups for founders, and speaks worldwide on human-computer interaction, interface design, startup leadership, and software engineering.
A graduate of Yale University and Interlochen Arts Academy with degrees in music composition, Jensen lives in Seattle with his wife, three teenage daughters, and two cats.