Timeline
June 2026 - Present
Role
Product Design Intern
Scope
Product Design
Design Engineering
Web Design
Overview
Zucca is a seed-stage startup building an AI operating system for CPG product development. It brings scattered specs, nutrition labeling requirements, and product workflows together, helping R&D, Innovation, Quality & Regulatory, and Brand teams collaborate with ease.
My role
Product Designer, Design Engineer
Through this internship I was not just a product designer, but a design engineer. Beyond rethinking and designing, I was given full control to implement my designs directly into the app, using Linear for ticket management and Claude Code. The engineering team essentially operated as a support/quality control for design work, but I had full ownership of implementation. I worked on several projects, big to small; below I highlight three major projects, with a summary of other selected work at the end.
PROJECT HIGHLIGHT 1
Designing for system awareness
First, I redesigned Zucca's notification system. Since Zucca is meant to operate as a cross-team platform, having awareness of what other team members are doing in the app is essential.
Decision: Scoping
What does the user need to see and when?
The first step of designing the notifications was to think about what types of notifications the user would want to know about. I decided to focus on three features with distinct purposes and goals.
Rationale: Add awareness of what others are doing and add more life into the workspace.
New products
New team members
Reformulation progress
Commenting activity
New spec documents
Rationale: Emphasize the items most critical to the CPG development workflow.
Reformulation complete
Conflict detection
Comments mentioning the user
Rationale: Communicate every change that occurs within an individual product workspace.
Reformulation complete
Conflict detection and solutions
Comment activity
Document upload
Formula change
Decision: Actor based
The first exploration treated the activity feed as a list of action items so users would treat it as a sort of task list.
The second exploration made it a static feed but focused on the item itself.
My final version kept it as a static feed but focused on the actor, rather than the item. I wanted to consolidate action items to the global notifications and keep the activity feed as a more of a news feed that focuses on adding system awareness.
The decision to make it actor-based was to emphasize Zucca as a team workspace, so that users can see their team’s activity in the app at a glance.
Explorations
Final
Building it
At this point, the system only supported comment related notifications. My work was not only designing UI but also vibe coding other notifications in the backend so that the proper events would trigger a new notifications. The implementation of all three notification system spanned several tickets.
Solution
A comprehensive, cohesive system
Global Notifications
Activity Feed
Product Notifications
PROJECT HIGHLIGHT 2: Claude "design skill"
Writing AI workflows to support design
A recurring problem with the app was design inconsistency. As a startup with daily-evolving features, a lot of UI in the app was implemented by engineers using Claude, which meant that they were not up to UI/UX best standards or consistent with the rest of the app. I created a design skill that Claude would read whenever new designs got built, so that engineers when implemented new designs, they would automatically follow the design rules that we decided on.
"Claude, create a design skill for the component of dropdown menus. Match them to this Figma component [Figma link]."
The implementation workflow
Impact for the team
Design decisions made once get applied everywhere.
Building this design skill saved our team so much time in the long run. Before, every UI change meant a handoff, a review, and a round of fixes. Now the design system is built into how we build, so engineers get consistent, on-brand UI on the first pass and designers spend their time on new problems instead of fixing colors and padding for hours.
SELECTED WORK
User onboarding flow
Figma & Vibe Coded
Build a product animation
Made with Claude
"How Zucca Works"
Interactive Framer implementation
Meet the team
Framer implementation
Lessons learned
I can be a design engineer.
This internship not only threw me into vibe coding, but gave me a level of responsibility that I thrived on. I really enjoyed that I got to ship my designs from start to production code. I feel much more confident in my capabilities as a design engineer after working in this role and am eager to continue to level up my impact.
Prioritization is critical.
Working at a startup means there are infinite things to work on and improve. Building the right thing at the right time is crucial in helping a startup succeed, so I learned to be ok with leaving small design tasks on the back burner so I could focus my energy on more important projects that required more intentional thinking.