VP, Product Design

Zuora • Foster City, CA

18h • $260,000 - $390,000

About The Position

Zuora is seeking a VP, Product Design to play a central role in defining the future of its product experience. 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. 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. Zuora sits at the center of the transformation driven by the move from one-time transactions to recurring, usage-based and increasingly complex monetization models, especially in an AI-driven world. This role is critical at an inflection point for Zuora, with an opportunity to reimagine the product experience when AI can understand intent, make recommendations, take action and operate on a customer's behalf.

Requirements

• Highly accomplished design leader who has helped organizations rethink products, experiences, and operating models during periods of significant technological change.
• Strong track record leading product design organizations within sophisticated technology companies.
• Exceptional judgment around interaction design, customer experience, and product strategy.
• Demonstrated ability to lead design through significant product or organizational transformation and establish a compelling design vision.
• Experience designing AI-native or agentic experiences is highly desirable, or demonstrated intellectual curiosity and product judgment to think beyond established patterns.
• Strong experience partnering with Product and Engineering leaders.
• Comfortable engaging deeply in technology, architecture, and the implications of AI on product design.
• Ability to move fluidly between customer problems, product strategy, interaction models, and technical realities.
• Understanding that AI changes the relationship between the customer and the product, influencing interaction models, information architecture, workflows, autonomy, and human control.
• Highly customer-centric and comfortable spending significant time with customers, understanding complex enterprise workflows and translating insights into compelling product experiences.
• Exceptional communicator and storyteller, capable of articulating a design vision that inspires stakeholders.
• Executive presence to challenge established thinking while building trust for organizational change.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain exceptional design talent and build organizations capable of operating with creativity and accountability.
• Experience in enterprise SaaS, complex workflow products, platforms, or products serving sophisticated business users is strongly preferred.
• Energized by ambiguity and wants to help define what design and the product experience should become in an AI-native world.

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing AI-native or agentic experiences is highly desirable.
• Experience in enterprise SaaS, complex workflow products, platforms or products serving sophisticated business users is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Define the design vision for an AI-native product experience, moving 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, exploring the balance between direct customer interaction, AI action, automation, human control, transparency and trust.
• Design for agentic experiences by establishing design principles and patterns for AI agents that understand context, make recommendations, execute workflows and take actions, ensuring agent behavior is understandable, predictable, and controllable.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and AI to establish a more integrated approach to product development, moving from sequential handoffs toward collaborative, iterative product development.
• Build a modern design organization by evolving its capabilities and operating model for an AI-native company, establishing high standards for interaction design, product thinking, systems thinking, and customer experience.
• Create a coherent experience across the Zuora platform by establishing design principles and systems that ensure consistency while allowing teams to move quickly, simplifying complex workflows and making enterprise capabilities more intuitive and intelligent.
• Bring the customer into the design process by developing a deep understanding of customers and their workflows through research and insight, ensuring AI-enabled experiences solve real customer problems.
• Establish responsible design principles for AI, defining how Zuora approaches trust, transparency, explainability, human oversight, permissions, errors, and recovery in AI-enabled and agentic experiences.
• Partner with executive and business leadership, serving as a senior voice on customer experience and product strategy, and demonstrating how design can be a source of differentiation and competitive advantage.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Variable bonus and performance-based reward opportunities
• Retirement programs
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Generous, flexible time off
• Paid holidays
• Wellness days
• Company-wide year-end break
• Paid parental leave (including fully paid leave for eligible ZEOs, subject to local policy)
• Learning & development stipend
• Opportunities to volunteer and give back, including charitable donation matching
• Mental wellbeing resources and support

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed