Sanju Varma

Product Designer · Design Lead

Hands-on design lead shipping complex workflows and enterprise/B2B SaaS products end-to-end. I design in Figma and lead an AI-native design practice, using Claude Code and Cursor as creative partners to build artifacts and coded prototypes for handoff to engineering teams.

sanju.designsanju_varma@icloud.comlinkedin.com/in/sanjuvarma(312) 375-8400San Francisco Bay Area

Experience

Design Lead at Zūm

Apr 2024 – Present · Connected Mobility Experience

  • Lead design end-to-end for dispatch, driver, parent and planning apps; helped launch 8 school districts as Zūm grew from 5,500 to 7,500+ schools and revenue grew 35% in 2025.
  • Design and ship Zūm's AI: conversational and agent interfaces, AI-assisted routing and real-time monitoring, prototyping in code and testing with real users before engineering builds.

Design Lead at Tesla

Mar 2020 – Dec 2023 · Tesla for Business

  • Set the design vision and took Tesla for Business 0-to-1 as hands-on lead with 3 PMs and 12 engineers; managed 2 designers. It grew to 150,000+ fleet vehicles in 27 countries.
  • Built bulk ordering and delivery behind the Hertz and Uber deals: onboarding fell from 6 weeks to 15 minutes; sales grew 150% year over year in 2022.
  • Led product strategy for Fleet API, Tesla's developer platform; streaming telemetry cut fleets' data costs 94%.

Design Lead at Cisco

Oct 2017 – Mar 2020 · Enterprise Networking

  • Led a global team of 10+ designers in San Jose and Bangalore; created the Cohesion design system.
  • Cut network setup from 3 months to 2 weeks with intent-driven orchestration.

Design Lead at Adobe

Jul 2016 – Oct 2017 · Admin Console

  • Led 3 designers and a researcher, with 4 PMs and 20+ engineers.
  • Moved business customers to digital licenses: adoption grew 200%, onboarding fell from 4–8 weeks to 1–3 hours.

Head of Design at PubMatic

Jan 2012 – Jul 2016

  • Grew design from 4 to 8 across Pune, Redwood City and New York, with 4 PMs and 200+ engineers.
  • Led PubMatic Analytics, the first real-time analytics for publishers; adoption grew 900%, from about 6% to 60% of customers.

Head of Design, Ads at Yodle (now Web.com)

May 2007 – Jan 2012

  • Joined as founding product designer (employee #18); grew the design team to 15+ designers and researchers.

Product Designer at Hearst

Mar 2005 – Apr 2007