Dear Senior Leadership Council,
It’s a joy to introduce Joshua Haupt, our new vice president of Product and Experience. I have tremendous respect for Joshua, and I’m grateful for how the Lord has led him to Young Life at such an important time for our mission.
A quick word about GMET: Global Mission Enablement and Technology (GMET) is the evolution of what was previously Information Services (IT). Today, GMET is a broader mission-enablement organization made up of seven capabilities: 1) Security, Risk and Trust; 2) Product and Experience; 3) Engineering and Platform Enablement; 4) Mission Intelligence; 5) Global Service Delivery and Support; 6) Mission Design and Capability Architecture; and 7) GMET Capacity and Organizational Excellence.
Together, these capabilities exist to increase Young Life’s capacity to support ministry at greater scale, equipping more people to participate, strengthening financial and operational capacity, improving decision-making and support, reducing risk, and ensuring the technology behind the mission is secure, reliable, and able to grow with it.
Just as important, we are changing how we work. Rather than building for the field from a distance, we will build with the people carrying the mission — listening first, understanding the problem together, and shaping and testing solutions together.
Joshua’s role is critical to making that shift real. As vice president of Product and Experience, his work begins with listening. Joshua and his team will work alongside staff, volunteers, donors, leaders, and ministry partners to understand what they are trying to accomplish and where friction exists, then partner across GMET to co-create experiences that genuinely serve the people carrying and participating in the mission.
Joshua brings nearly two decades at InterVarsity, spanning both field ministry and product leadership. He knows what it is like to carry ministry personally and what it takes to build technology around the realities of the people doing the work. That combination is exactly why I’m so excited to have him here.
From Joshua:
