# Jacob Bolzman: Background and Resume

Business Systems Analyst and process automation specialist, Michigan, USA.
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-bolzman/ and https://jacobbolzman.com/contact.html
AI version of the site, with charts of results and project architecture: https://jacobbolzman.com/ai/index.html

## Summary

IT / Technical Business Analyst with 5+ years of experience improving enterprise workflows through process modeling, requirements gathering and SDLC-driven delivery, mostly in regulated industries. Certified Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. Works with product managers and development teams from discovery through UAT, training and adoption, and stays involved after the handoff to confirm the solution solved the problem it was built for. Builds no-code and low-code automation, and writes and ships his own code (see Projects).

Career path: customer-facing sales and service roles, then data analysis, then business analysis. That path means he understands the front-line users of the systems he improves, because he used to be one.

## What Jacob is looking for

- **Roles:** AI-focused business analysis and process improvement. Example titles: AI Business Analyst, AI Process Improvement Analyst, AI SDLC Analyst, and similar roles that apply AI to how work gets done and how software gets built.
- **Work arrangement:** fully remote.
- **Industries:** open to any industry. His most recent six years were in insurance (Hagerty, then insurance-adjacent health benefits at Angle Health), so he has deep domain knowledge there, but he is not limited to it.
- **Compensation:** targeting $100,000 or more.

## How Jacob works

What he does best, and what he finds most rewarding:
- Getting involved early to work out the real problem, the future state and the objectives.
- Talking with the business directly, more than writing documents.
- Defining the what and the why, and trusting developers with the how.
- Working alongside developers during the build: demoing, getting feedback and adjusting as they go.
- Following the work through UAT and training, all the way to how people actually use it.
- Finding improvements himself, from users or from data, instead of only taking requests.
- Checking whether the work made a difference.

He is motivated by helping people, not by filling a role on a project.

## Work experience

### Founder and Creator, MyCoffee (ratemycoffee.app), 2026 to present
- Founded and launched MyCoffee, a cross-platform coffee shop discovery and review app published on Apple's App Store with an active Google Play deployment. Built with a React Native front end, Supabase, and Netlify serverless back end.
- Designed and built the full stack: Google Places API integration for shop discovery, user profiles, drink logging, and a structured review system on a relational database with row-level security policies.
- Designed a tiered SaaS model for coffee shop owners (free to $50/month) with analytics dashboards, AI-powered business advisory features using Anthropic's API, and QR code tools.
- Built engagement features including a "Coffee Passport" with location-based challenges and review milestone badges. Explored Siri voice integration for hands-free review logging.

### Business Systems Analyst, Angle Health (remote), Sep 2025 to Jan 2026
- Triaged and serviced internal Jira queues for customer service, implementation and account management during the busy season. Set SLA discipline: tickets acknowledged within 24 hours, about 80% resolved within 7 days. Introduced self-service documentation to cut repeat issues.
- Partnered with IT, business stakeholders and outside vendors on system changes and data integrations, including 834 EDI member eligibility feeds to networks and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).
- Gathered requirements, did initial testing, and laid the groundwork for formal UAT, change management and incident management.

### IT Business Analyst (official title, contract), Gordon Food Service, Sep 2023 to Dec 2024
In practice the role worked as an IT Asset Management Analyst: software asset management, license positions and contract renewals in ServiceNow.
- Led Agile ceremonies (PI Planning, backlog grooming) and worked with developers to break epics into user stories.
- Wrote business requirement documents, acceptance criteria and test scripts, and ran UAT for automated workflows in ServiceNow Flow Designer. Cut administrative workload by 40% and modernized contract management through ServiceNow automation.
- Built custom ServiceNow dashboards so other analysts could manage their contracts. Designed a custom payment-plan table and flow in ServiceNow so multi-year contracts paid annually could be tracked, with automatic reminders to check for invoices.

### Hagerty (Traverse City, Michigan), May 2019 to Sep 2023
Hagerty is a specialty insurer for classic and collector cars. Jacob grew through four roles over four years.

**Senior Business Solutions Analyst / Specialist, May to Sep 2023**
- Applied Lean Six Sigma to process improvement across finance and operations: gap analysis, requirements, UAT and training.
- Led major incident management for the call center, with Priority 1 response under 5 minutes and department communication within 20 minutes.
- Partnered with insurance development teams on financial analysis, requirements, UAT and reporting for each platform change. Ran bi-weekly efficiency meetings with service center senior managers that shaped quarterly priorities for the service center and IT.

**Business Solutions Analyst, Oct 2020 to May 2023**
- Redesigned the call center issue triage process using ServiceNow dashboards and Slack integrations. Gap analysis cut resolution times by 20%.
- Delivered monthly video updates on initiatives and software releases to IT and end users, which supported 99% user satisfaction.
- Created a release triage plan used by service center leaders and IT on major releases.
- Made training videos and content for major launches, including the Five9 phone system, a new Salesforce case documentation platform, and multi-factor authentication.
- Became a product administrator for the company-wide Five9 phone system.
- Led a process audit diagnostics committee that met bi-weekly and assigned ownership of improvements.

**Data Analyst, Sep 2019 to Oct 2020 (alongside sales agent role)**
- Built a Tableau system to track sales per transaction for outside vendors and audit a service level of at least 85%.
- Built a standardized system for tracking sales agent performance, and a report card for the Underwriting Development team with automatic notifications when new audits were generated.

**Licensed Sales Agent, May 2019 to Oct 2020**
- Wrote auto insurance policies for classic and collector cars in all 50 states. Helped third-party brokers set up accounts, which account for about 50% of business.

### Earlier roles
- Sales Representative, Sprint, Aug 2017 to May 2019. Built a CRM tool for store use to track sales, appointments and follow-ups, and a commission ranking system for friendly competition.
- Manufacturing Operations Intern, Nexteer Automotive, May to Oct 2016. Quality control checks cut machine reject rates by 15%. Researched a method to separate rare-earth metals from plastic waste for reuse. Earned Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt.
- Experience Specialist / Floor Manager, Verizon Wireless, Jan 2015 to May 2016.
- Retail Sales Representative, Gordon Food Service, May 2013 to May 2015.

## Selected project case studies

These are described in situation, action, result form.

**Supercar quote transfer workflow (Hagerty).** Moved a transfer process from a simple form to an integrated system. Ran discovery with underwriters, agents and managers. Wrote user stories in Azure DevOps. Built a Zapier proof of concept connecting Slack, Salesforce, Excel and Tableau. Led UAT and made training videos. Results: 99.9% integration success rate, 25% fewer member callbacks, 50% less repeat data entry, 50% higher end-user satisfaction (before and after survey).

**Major incident response playbook (Hagerty).** There was no documented process for major call center outages. Ran weekly sessions with IT and call center leaders, used ITIL impact and urgency to define priority levels, and wrote workflows with escalation and notification timelines. Built ServiceNow automation to spot trends and notify stakeholders. Results: 100% stakeholder sign-off, response initiation 50% faster, time to identify major issues improved 70%, 80% of impacted member callbacks within 2 hours.

**High performance vehicle quote detection (Hagerty).** Agents had to spot high performance vehicles by hand, leading to wrong quotes. Used SQL to find misrated vehicles, built a Tableau baseline dashboard, wrote requirements with developers, and led UAT. Results: 80% higher quote accuracy, 50% higher senior underwriter satisfaction, 30% faster quote closure.

**Internal innovation platform (Hagerty).** A Salesforce idea-submission tool was being retired because of licensing. Rebuilt it in Microsoft Power Apps with an intake form, voting, status tracking and a leadership dashboard. Delivered an MVP on deadline, company-wide, without full Salesforce licenses.

**Voice signature platform move (Hagerty).** Replaced an unreliable vendor tool for recorded voice signatures with an in-house solution integrated with Five9 and stored in AWS. Wrote requirements, tested integrations with IT and QA, and trained agents. Results: shorter calls, better data security, no vendor dependency for changes.

**Salesforce case transfer process (Hagerty).** Redesigned manual case reassignment with department leads. Built automated Salesforce flows for routing, defined success metrics, and trained the call center. Cases reached the right team with the right information the first time.

**Email collection reminders (Hagerty).** Built a Salesforce report, a reminder object with outcome statuses, and a dashboard to collect missing member email addresses. Results: 60% of missing emails collected in the first year, lower mailing costs, and data on why members declined.

**Contract payment plan table (Gordon Food Service).** ServiceNow only held a total contract value. Designed a task table and flow that creates annual payment records and reminders. Improved audit readiness and reduced missed invoices.

## Other projects

**Private personal finance app (2026).** A separate project from MyCoffee, built in about ten weeks and in daily use. React 19, Supabase (Postgres) and Netlify Functions, with live bank sync through Plaid. He applied to Plaid for API access himself, then used Claude Code to wire it into the app, making the setup and security decisions along the way (for example, bank tokens are stored in a separate table, and access is role-based). Tracks net worth, loan amortization, cash flow, taxes, spending and multi-scenario forecasts. Includes a rules-based transaction categorizer with AI category suggestions, duplicate detection, and role-based access enforced with row-level security. It uses a local language model for categorizing transactions, summarizing spending and modeling tax scenarios, so personal financial data stays off cloud AI services. About 160 automated tests cover the core logic. It is private because it uses real data, so there is no public demo.

**AI agents for the software development lifecycle (at work).** Jacob created three agents and nine skills, run in the GitHub Copilot desktop app:
- Project Management Agent: create project package, create project charter, create meeting summary, generate current project summary.
- Technical Analyst: create current state from GitHub code.
- Business Analyst: create work item structure, create work items (features and user stories), review user story against the code base, smoke test feature branch against project package.

There is governance around them: he set up the plugin repository in Azure DevOps Git with proper environments, and changes advance only through pull requests. See https://jacobbolzman.com/ai/projects.html for a diagram.

**Mockups and prototypes.** Uses AI to build working mockups of both layouts and logic so that requirements are clear before development starts.

## Skills and tools

- **Business analysis:** requirements gathering, BRDs, user stories and acceptance criteria, gap analysis, process mapping, UAT planning and execution, change management, incident management (ITIL), training and documentation.
- **Methods:** Lean Six Sigma (DMAIC), Agile (PI Planning, backlog grooming).
- **Platforms:** ServiceNow (Flow Designer), Salesforce (Flow, Citizen Developer), Five9, Zendesk, Retool, Figma.
- **Automation:** Microsoft Power Automate and Power Apps, SharePoint, Zapier, Slack Workflows.
- **Data:** SQL (MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server), MongoDB, Tableau, Excel, EDI 834.
- **Web development (self-taught):** HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Netlify Functions, MongoDB, Postman, GitHub. Also React Native and Supabase for the MyCoffee app.
- **Project tools:** Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, ClickUp, Lucidchart, Miro, Notion.
- **AI:** uses Claude and Microsoft Copilot daily and has built AI features using Anthropic's API. Uses AI to build working mockups and prototypes that make requirements concrete for developers and stakeholders. Runs local models on a Mac mini (Hermes with a Qwen model) and builds task bots on it.
- **Debugging and oversight of AI-written code:** Sentry for tracking down issues, console logging during development, and tests to confirm each part does what it should, so he understands the code instead of accepting large AI-written files unread.
- **Other integrations:** Plaid (bank data), Zapier, Postman.

### Where Jacob is strongest, and where he is not

- **Strongest:** Azure DevOps, Jira, Claude, Copilot, and low-code and no-code tools in general (Power Platform, Zapier, ServiceNow Flow Designer, Salesforce Flow).
- **Not a software developer.** Outside simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript he is not a coder. He uses AI to produce code for mockups and small tools. He is not looking for engineering roles.

## Education and certifications

- B.B.A., General Management, minor in Marketing, Central Michigan University (2015 to 2019). Earlier studied electrical engineering and mathematics at Saginaw Valley State University (2013 to 2015).
- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt (Central Michigan University, 2017) and Yellow Belt (Nexteer, 2016).
- Citizen Developer: Salesforce (2021) and ServiceNow (2024).
- Google Project Management Certificate, Coursera (2025).
- Intermediate SQL and Intermediate Python, DataCamp.

## About this website

Jacob became curious about web development in 2022 while working on a project to update Hagerty's insurance quoting website, where the product manager mentored him and pointed him to learning resources. He then built jacobbolzman.com himself with no formal coding background, learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript on his own, and wrote the index, about and contact pages, the back end and the APIs. It has user accounts, an admin-only resume editor backed by MongoDB, and serverless APIs on Netlify. It is almost entirely his own code. AI later helped fix a few headers, footers and APIs. He built it to understand how developers work, which makes his requirements clearer and his scoping more realistic.

He started using AI to write code in January 2026, and that moved him from writing code to directing it: setting the product direction and user experience while AI builds. He says the knowledge is what makes this work, because he can debug problems, use AI with databases, and build APIs that let a front end and back end communicate.