VP, Product Design
Zuora · Foster City, California, United States
USD 260,000 to 390,000 a year
COMPANY OVERVIEW
Zuora was founded to help companies navigate one of the most fundamental shifts in modern business: the move from one-time transactions to recurring, usage-based and increasingly complex monetization models. Today, that shift is accelerating as companies across industries rethink how they package, price and deliver value in an AI-driven world. Zuora sits at the center of this transformation.
The company provides a cloud-based platform that enables organizations to manage the full quote-to-cash lifecycle, including pricing, billing, collections, payments and revenue recognition. Its breadth across the quote-to-cash stack, combined with its ability to handle highly complex pricing models, has positioned Zuora as a trusted partner to finance organizations and a mission-critical platform for modern monetization.
The market is now entering another period of fundamental change. AI and agentic technologies are reshaping how software is built, how customers interact with products and how companies create and monetize value. Zuora has an opportunity not simply to add AI to its existing products, but to rethink the product experience and the way customers interact with software in an AI-native world.
This is a critical inflection point for Zuora. The company has a strong product foundation, deep enterprise relationships and significant domain expertise. At the same time, there is an opportunity to reimagine how the product experience works when AI can understand intent, make recommendations, take action and increasingly operate on a customer's behalf.
Zuora is seeking a VP, Product Design to play a central role in defining that future. This leader will help shape the next generation of Zuora's product experience and establish a design model built for an AI-native and increasingly agentic world.
ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES
The VP, Design will lead the evolution of design at Zuora as the company transforms toward an AI-native product and operating model. This leader will partner closely with Product, Engineering, AI and executive leadership to rethink how customers interact with Zuora—not simply by improving existing interfaces, but by exploring fundamentally different ways software can understand intent, guide decisions and take action.
Define the design vision for an AI-native product experience. Establish a clear design vision and point of view for how Zuora products should work in an AI-driven and agentic world. Help the organization move beyond traditional user-interface thinking toward experiences built around customer intent, intelligent assistance, automation and outcomes.
Help define what the next generation of enterprise software looks like. Challenge existing assumptions about how customers should interact with complex enterprise applications. Explore when customers should interact directly with the product, when AI should act on their behalf, and where the right balance exists between automation, human control, transparency and trust.
Design for agentic experiences. Establish design principles and patterns for products in which AI agents can understand context, make recommendations, execute workflows and take actions across complex quote-to-cash processes. Create experiences that make agent behavior understandable, predictable and controllable while maintaining customer confidence.
Partner with Product, Engineering and AI to transform how products are built. Work at the intersection of design, product management, engineering, data and AI to establish a more integrated approach to product development. Help teams move from sequential handoffs toward highly collaborative, iterative product development built around experimentation, learning and measurable outcomes.
Build a modern design organization. Evolve the design organization, capabilities and operating model required for an AI-native company. Establish high standards for interaction design, product thinking, systems thinking and customer experience while developing a culture that encourages experimentation and challenges conventional approaches.
Create a coherent experience across the Zuora platform. Establish design principles and systems that create consistency across products while allowing teams to move quickly. Simplify complex workflows and make powerful enterprise capabilities more intuitive, accessible and intelligent.
Bring the customer into the design process. Develop deep understanding of customers and their workflows through direct engagement, research, observation and quantitative and qualitative insight. Ensure that AI-enabled experiences solve real customer problems rather than simply demonstrate new technology.
Establish responsible design principles for AI. Help define how Zuora should approach trust, transparency, explainability, human oversight, permissions, errors and recovery in AI-enabled and agentic experiences. Ensure that the experience reflects the level of confidence customers need when AI is making decisions or taking actions within critical business processes.
Partner with executive and business leadership. Serve as a senior voice on customer experience and product strategy, bringing design into the earliest stages of strategic thinking rather than treating it as a downstream execution function. Help the organization understand how design can become a source of differentiation and competitive advantage.
IDEAL CANDIDATE CHARACTERISTICS
The ideal candidate is a highly accomplished design leader who has helped organizations rethink products, experiences and operating models during periods of significant technological change. This is not a role for someone who is primarily focused on visual design, design systems or optimizing an established product experience.
We are looking for a design thinker and builder who is genuinely excited about what AI changes about the product experience.
The successful candidate will have a strong track record leading product design organizations within sophisticated technology companies and will bring exceptional judgment around interaction design, customer experience and product strategy.
They will have demonstrated the ability to lead design through significant product or organizational transformation and to establish a compelling design vision while bringing an organization along with it.
Experience designing AI-native or agentic experiences is highly desirable, but we are equally interested in leaders who have demonstrated the intellectual curiosity and product judgment to think beyond today's established patterns. We do not expect someone to have a complete playbook for agentic enterprise software. We want someone capable of helping write it.
The ideal candidate will bring strong experience partnering with Product and Engineering leaders and will be comfortable engaging deeply in technology, architecture and the implications of AI on product design. They should be able to move fluidly between customer problems, product strategy, interaction models and the technical realities required to bring those experiences to life.
They will understand that AI changes more than the interface. It changes the relationship between the customer and the product: from navigating screens and features toward expressing intent and achieving outcomes. They will have a point of view on how that shift should influence interaction models, information architecture, workflows, autonomy and human control.
The successful candidate will be highly customer-centric and comfortable spending significant time with customers, understanding complex enterprise workflows and translating those insights into compelling product experiences.
They will be an exceptional communicator and storyteller, capable of articulating a design vision that inspires designers, product managers, engineers and executives alike. They will have the executive presence to challenge established thinking while building the trust necessary to create meaningful org