Building a Design-First Culture
from the Ground Up

A visual win first, to earn the right to go deeper.

Before tackling information architecture or systems, I needed to demonstrate what design-led thinking could actually produce. I started with the billing application, Zuora's largest and most complex product. Over about a month, the team developed a new visual direction that included early IA thinking, establishing consistent experience patterns and interaction motions across the application. We then spent roughly two months in engineering, cleaning up fragmented CSS and front-end inconsistencies across multiple architectures within a single app.

The result was a billing application that finally felt like one product. More importantly, it gave us credibility. Product and engineering teams that had been skeptical of design investment could see, concretely, what a design-led approach produced. That opened the door to the harder, deeper work.

Information architecture as the structural foundation.

With credibility established, we moved into information architecture normalization across the suite. This was the work that required real organizational alignment: restructuring how users moved through the product, how features were grouped, how the three Zuora applications related to each other experientially.

Within about 18 months, every PM with front-end responsibility was aligned to our direction. That shift from skepticism to partnership was itself a cultural milestone.

The Occam Design System: from consistency tool to strategic asset.

Running in parallel to the IA work, we began building what would become the Occam Design System. Occam wasn't just a component library; it was a codified language for how Zuora products should look, feel, and behave. It included a fully accessible component library (WCAG 2.1 AA), a comprehensive UX pattern library, and, critically, AI UX/UI patterns that were originally written as guidance for engineers working with the system.

That last piece turned out to be more significant than we anticipated. The AI patterns, originally written as guardrails for human engineers, became the training foundation for something more ambitious.

Designing for the age of agentic development.

As AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code became part of how engineers and PMs worked, a new problem emerged: how do you maintain design integrity when everyone can build? The answer we developed was the Occam Design Skill, an agentic design layer that trains AI coding tools to build UI using only Occam components and Figma design tokens. When a PM or engineer vibe-codes something new, the agent produces output that's already in compliance with the design system.

This is still being refined. We're hitting the current edges of what agents can reliably do, but the direction is clear: democratize building without sacrificing design quality. Guardrails, not gatekeeping.

The other half of that vision is equally important. I've been spearheading an effort to get Zuora's designers coding alongside engineers using Cursor and Claude Code, moving toward a model where product designers become product owners who deliver code directly to engineering. Not specs, not redlines, but actual pull requests submitted for code review.