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Jensen Harris
Co-Founder & CEO at Textio 🏳️🌈
Jensen Harris is the Co-Founder and current Chief Executive Officer of Textio, a Seattle-based startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help remove bias from workplace language. He took over as CEO in January 2024, succeeding his wife, Kieran Snyder, who stepped down to become Chief Scientist Emeritus.13
Background and Career
- Education: Harris holds a degree in music composition from Yale University and Interlochen Arts Academy.2
- Professional Experience: Before co-founding Textio, Harris spent 16 years at Microsoft, where he led the development of influential software such as the Ribbon user interface for Microsoft Office, the email design for Microsoft Outlook, and the touch-optimized interface for Microsoft Surface.12
- Roles at Textio: Initially, Harris served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from 2014 to 2022. He then transitioned to Chief Experience Officer before becoming CEO.5
Leadership and Expertise
Harris is known for his expertise in user experience design and software engineering. He is a strong advocate for creating elegant and intuitive solutions that bring people joy. Additionally, he is an executive coach and facilitates T-groups to help startup executives develop interpersonal skills.2
Current Focus
As CEO, Harris is focused on expanding Textio's products, particularly Textio Lift, which helps managers write unbiased feedback and reports. He aims to accelerate the company's growth and bring its technology to more organizations.13 Harris is also active in speaking engagements and is scheduled to participate in events like #Transform2025.4
Highlights
As a manager, I'm often anxious that I'm not giving the most helpful feedback, the feedback that will help someone on my team thrive and grow.
One of the most important moments in each of the last few years for has been the yearly release of the industry report on performance feedback trends.
What are the patterns in delivering great feedback that make people thrive? What feedback make great team members more likely to quit? Where are managers falling down and how can they improve?
The 2024 industry report that just came out today is excellent and full of interesting data! In particular, I didn't realize that top performers actually get the LEAST useful feedback by a staggering amount.
Here's all the data:
I'm so exhausted hearing every legacy software product talk breathlessly about shoehorning AI into their products.
They all sound the same: "trust us, really exciting stuff is coming!" "It will be transformative!" "It will be unique!" "Oh, yeah, your data is definitely safe."
In reality, most of these products are either vaporware (haven't shipped) or light wrappers around OpenAI, the same tech in ChatGPT.
Textio was founded as an AI company in 2014. We shipped generative AI in Textio in 2019, more than three years before ChatGPT.
So, we have started a (hopefully) helpful series of articles to help you evaluate the AI claims of HR products.
Are some of these products doing a better job than others? You betcha.
Today's product: Lattice
https://lnkd.in/edRYgW7j
