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Joe Szacon

Mesa, AZ 85212 | LinkedIn | joeszacon.com

Principal Product Designer | AI-Assisted Workflows | Intelligent Systems

Principal product designer with 19+ years of experience designing complex workflows, enterprise platforms, and high-impact customer experiences across consumer and B2B systems. Recent work focuses on AI-assisted and AI-native products, especially where software helps perform the work rather than simply display information.

Brings systems thinking, workflow design, journey mapping, research, UX/UI execution, and technical fluency to move from ambiguity to working proof quickly. Strong track record of translating complexity into products users can trust and teams can ship.

Systems thinking • Workflow design • Journey mapping • User research • UX/UI execution • Design systems • Technical fluency

Experience

RTA Fleet | User Experience Designer

Glendale, AZ | 2025 – Present

  • Leading UX and AI-enabled product improvements for enterprise fleet management software serving 1,100+ fleets and 500,000+ vehicles
  • Designed an AI-assisted sublet invoice ingestion workflow that reduced manual data entry from 11 minutes to under 1 minute per invoice, with projected annual savings of 8,300+ hours across 50,000+ invoices
  • Created a 0-1 design system with design manifesto, guiding principles, reusable patterns, design tokens, and Figma variables to improve consistency and product quality across multiple teams
  • Conducted onsite field research at fleet operations, interviewing users across expertise levels and using journey maps, story maps, and prototypes to validate workflows and product direction
  • Built Python- and AI-assisted analysis workflows to classify 6,000+ user feedback items and improve roadmap prioritization
  • Standardized journey mapping, rapid prototyping, and research-driven planning practices to support discovery, validation, and cross-functional alignment

Wayfair | Senior Customer Experience Program Manager

Remote | 2022 – 2025

  • Recruited to stand up a new portfolio-level CX program role for one of Wayfair’s highest-priority customer experience transformation initiatives
  • Led CX program strategy for progressive replatforming of customer-facing web and native-app funnels across 5 brands, multiple international markets, and 35+ cross-functional teams
  • Drove rollout of the replatformed experience from 0% to 72% of traffic by creating the planning structure, dependency visibility, and cross-team alignment needed to ship at scale
  • Built and normalized OKR planning, reporting, and prioritization practices for the portfolio, helping teams connect roadmap decisions to measurable outcomes and achieve 100% goal completion across multiple planning cycles
  • Created systems for dependency mapping, milestone tracking, and executive reporting across 200+ contributors, improving visibility, decision-making speed, and delivery predictability
  • Developed Wayfair’s first GenAI-powered internal reporting system, connecting Jira delivery data to OKRs and surfacing planning risks and progress for leadership
  • Created an AI-assisted story-generation workflow to improve user story quality, QA alignment, and planning clarity

American Express | Principal of Product UX/UI | Sr. UX Architect

Phoenix, AZ | 2018 – 2022

  • Held progressively senior product and UX roles across authentication, card application, onboarding, and supporting admin experiences
  • Led UX strategy and end-to-end design for digital card application journeys across multiple international markets, balancing regulatory requirements, local variation, and conversion performance
  • Helped launch 20+ card application journeys across the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, India, France, and Australia
  • Created a mid-purchase onboarding journey to support PSD2 requirements, driving 1.2M+ user adoptions while maintaining conversion rates
  • Led the end-to-end redesign of the SafeKey authentication experience, reducing abandonment by 70% and generating $11M in incremental bookings
  • Redesigned supporting admin and deployment tooling, improving consistency and reducing manual error as the team adopted Amex’s new design system and component model
  • Won industry recognition for “Best Security & Anti-Fraud Development Product”

GTB (Ford Motor Company) | Associate Director, Product Tech Enablement & Innovation | Product Tech Enablement & Innovation Lead

Dearborn, MI | 2012 – 2017

  • Led innovation design work for Ford’s digital transformation across connected-product concepts, responsive platform strategy, immersive demos, and physical/digital prototypes
  • Helped conceptualize FordPass during a Rapid Innovation Summit with Ford leadership, contributing to the connected-product vision that became central to Ford’s mobility strategy
  • Delivered Lincoln’s first responsive website, helping establish Ford’s mobile-first approach and contributing to $2M in annual savings
  • Designed and built custom physical/digital prototypes, including a feature simulation kiosk that translated complex vehicle capabilities into tangible customer experiences
  • Built connected demonstrations and presentation systems for Smart Mobility, SXSW, and Ford innovation initiatives using web, hardware, sensors, APIs, and narrative design

HelloWorld, Inc. (now Merkle) | Team Lead, UX Architecture & Front-End Development

Pleasant Ridge, MI | 2006 – 2012

  • Led UX architecture and front-end strategy for large-scale loyalty, rewards, and promotional platforms across web, service, and marketing operations
  • Led UX and information architecture for the Bare Escentuals loyalty platform, designing a multi-channel system spanning customer experience, CSR operations, and campaign management; the platform remained in use for more than a decade
  • Translated research, stakeholder input, and technical requirements into large-scale architecture, journey flows, wireframes, and integration-ready specifications across complex service and commerce workflows
  • Helped architect and deliver the Xbox Rewards platform, including framework and implementation decisions that supported 2M+ registered users, 10 languages, and years of continued evolution
  • Contributed to a 0-1 internal platform for generating enterprise promotional microsites and rewards programs at scale
  • Managed and coached a 5-person front-end team while helping drive responsive design, mobile-first thinking, and reusable implementation patterns across the company

Tools & Methods

Figma, journey mapping, user story mapping, user research, usability testing, design systems, prototyping, Jira, Confluence, OKRs, Python, Flask, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React

Education & Certification

  • Certified SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE)
  • Commercial Illustration, Macomb Community College
  • Design Thinking Workshop Certificate, Nielsen Norman Group