Entrusted to lead early AI platform projects including Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder, as the design leadership bridge between the AI Cloud and Experience Services organizations.

Shaping an AI-first strategy

As the design leadership bridge between the AI Cloud and Experience Services organizations, I collaborated with multiple teams to shape Salesforce's AI strategy and define how users interact with AI across products. Our work centered on three strategic pillars:

1. Assistive for experiences that respond to users in reactive, proactive, or agentic ways.
2. Embedded for integrating AI directly into familiar tools such as Experience Cloud's builder.
3. Immersive for experiences that enable AI to generate complete interfaces based on user intent. One example is my collaboration with the AI Frontiers team to design Generative Canvas for Lightning, a concept that empowers sales professionals by transforming intent into interfaces.

My team of product designers focused on the Assistive pillar by designing Einstein Copilot, Salesforce's systemwide conversational assistant. We led the creation of new components for mobile and desktop, defined the user experience for interacting with the Copilot panel, and collaborated with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud to align functionality and address internal use cases. Together, these efforts established the foundation for AI-powered workflows across the Salesforce ecosystem.

Scaling Copilot across Salesforce

The Experience Services organization at Salesforce is responsible for building products that empower internal teams to create new features and external customers to build applications. During the planning phase for Einstein Copilot, the goal was to design an experience that was extendable, modular, and easy for other clouds to integrate with. My team collaborated with multiple Salesforce clouds to understand their customers and ensure Copilot addressed their specific business needs.

Einstein Copilot was also designed to be easily adopted by both internal and external customers. Launching within the Lightning experience was only the beginning. Copilot quickly expanded into tools such as Lightning App Builder, Setup, and Experience Builder, where administrators could enhance their Salesforce instances with AI directly in context.

In addition to leading high-level experience design, my team of product designers drove the creation of new base components and interaction patterns specific to Einstein Copilot. I served as the bridge between the design system team and Experience Services engineering, ensuring we built a robust, scalable foundation that could support the needs of every Salesforce cloud.

After months of collaboration across the company, and extensive component and pattern development, Einstein Copilot was successfully integrated into multiple products in 2024, including Experience Builder, Setup, and Lightning Builder.

To achieve this scale, however, the team needed to rethink how Salesforce builds, tests, and launches cross-platform AI experiences, setting the stage for a new way of working across the organization.

From surprises to a shared vision

"Dave, I'm surprised by what is built at the end of a release." — Vice President, Product Management

That sentence, said to me in a one-on-one, changed how I lead and collaborate. It revealed a pattern that had quietly become part of the release cycle: goals set by the SVP were translated into projects by the VP and then handed to Directors and Senior Directors to execute. Teams began designing and building, but as engineering uncovered complexities, priorities shifted and timelines slipped. By the time end of release demos arrived, leadership was often surprised by what was delivered. The issue was not effort or intent; it was visibility and alignment across levels of the organization.

I took the initiative to address this gap. Partnering with PM and Engineering leaders, I introduced a new operating model that increased transparency, ensured continuous alignment, and reduced surprises at the end of each release. This process empowered teams to communicate changes in scope early, gave leadership clearer insight into progress, and ultimately strengthened trust between design, product, and engineering.

Designing a process for clarity and influence

To understand where gaps were forming during each release, I set out to interview all PMs and EMs in Experience Services. Through these conversations I uncovered three key insights:

• PM and UX leadership were not confident that UX had sufficient influence within the organization.
• New features were often not built to spec and failed to fully address customer problems.
• Leaders were frustrated with the current development process.

Reflecting on these lessons, I identified a central hypothesis: the VP needed regular visibility into work in progress throughout the release cycle.

When requirements shifted or engineering identified scope changes, designers iterated quickly, but these updates rarely reached the VP level. As a result, leadership lacked confidence that teams were still solving the right problems.

To fix this, I partnered with my PM and Engineering peers to create a new monthly, design-led review that included the VP and senior directors. The new review process would be:

Designer led: focused entirely on prototypes rather than documentation.

Empowering: giving designers direct opportunities to present their work to senior leadership.

Collaborative: allowing PM leadership to identify misalignment early and redirect efforts as needed.

These reviews gave leaders consistent visibility into progress and created a space for designers, PMs, and engineers to clarify scope and direction in real time. When confusion or disagreement arose, teams could quickly regain alignment. As the design leader, I organized agendas, wrote summaries, and shared recordings across the organization to ensure full transparency and shared understanding of priorities.

After the next release, I interviewed PM and Engineering stakeholders and received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Executive leaders gained clearer insight into plans and progress, and designers were energized by having regular opportunities to present directly to PM leadership. An unexpected benefit also emerged: PMs began defining requirements earlier in the release cycle to prepare for these reviews, which gave designers two to three extra weeks for collaboration and refinement before development began.

Building a culture of UX excellence

As the leader of the Mobile team, I noticed a growing backlog of P2 and P3 bugs filed by both designers and customers. Rather than viewing this as a maintenance issue, I saw it as an opportunity to influence PM and Engineering to dedicate resources in each release to improving product quality. Together, we established a new process called UXcellence.

My approach was to take a long-term view of quality across the Salesforce Mobile App. I partnered with PM and Engineering to set a goal of resolving a small number of issues in every sprint and tracking progress across the entire year.

The UXcellence initiative transformed the Salesforce Mobile App from a growing backlog to a continuously improving product. The App Store rating rose from 4.4 to 4.7 stars, and the sales team reported that customers cited the higher rating as a factor in their purchasing decisions. The program proved that design can directly influence measurable business outcomes by collaborating closely with PM and Engineering and participating in sprint planning and retrospectives.

Leading this effort reinforced one of my core beliefs as a design leader: excellence comes from consistent, incremental improvement. By embedding continuous improvement into each release, design becomes a driving force that enhances usability, strengthens trust, and fosters pride across the organization.