Leading Product Discovery design at AutoZone.
Senior UI design and team leadership for a Fortune 500 e-commerce site — shipping the Product Finder, AZ Rewards flows, and a full site relaunch with no reported loss in traffic.
Modernize the e-commerce experience for a Fortune 500 parts retailer — make it easier for customers to find the right product for their specific vehicle, and help relaunch the site without losing the customers who depend on it.
Senior UI Designer and team lead for design on a cross-functional Product Discovery team — plus mentorship, approvals, and onboarding for junior and associate designers.
Shipped the Product Finder (still in production), multi-state AZ Rewards flows, and contributed to a complete site relaunch with no reported loss in traffic.
The challenge
A Fortune 500 e-commerce site where the customer's first question is almost always: "will this part fit my vehicle?"
AutoZone serves millions of customers who don't browse for fun — they show up because something broke, something needs to be replaced, or they're mid-repair and missing a part. The hardest design problem in this category isn't selling. It's confidence: helping a customer be sure that the product on the page is the right product for the vehicle in their driveway.
When I joined as Senior UI Designer leading design for the Product Discovery team, the company was preparing for a complete site relaunch. My charge was hands-on senior UI work, leadership of the design team across cross-functional Product Discovery initiatives, and — alongside that — making sure the new site shipped without breaking the experience for the customers who needed it most.
Selected projects
The work that defined the role.
Product Finder (in production)
Designed the UI for a feature that lets customers see vehicle-specific specs — oil weight and capacity, wiper blade sizes, spark plug type — once they've set their vehicle. Shipped with oil, wipers, and plugs; expanded after launch to antifreeze, wheel nuts, brake fluid, and transmission fluid.
AZ Rewards flows
Designed multi-state flows covering every Rewards scenario: anonymous customer with no Rewards ID, anonymous customer with a Rewards ID from prior in-store visits, and signed-in customer who hasn't yet enrolled. Each path needed its own prompts and trade-offs.
Full site relaunch
Contributed to the design and launch of a new, clean, intuitive, responsive AutoZone.com — with no reported loss in traffic at cutover. The kind of relaunch outcome that gets noticed.
Team leadership
Led design across Product Discovery — approvals, direction-setting, and onboarding new designers. Mentored junior and associate designers, sharing the practice and the standards.
Decisions that mattered
Surfacing vehicle specs at the point of decision
Most customers don't know the oil weight, wiper size, or spark plug spec for their car — they look it up or guess. We surfaced those specs directly on product list pages once a vehicle was set, reducing the back-and-forth and increasing confidence at the moment of add-to-cart.
Designing every Rewards state, not just the happy path
The Rewards experience had to work for first-time anonymous customers, returning customers who'd never explicitly enrolled, and signed-in customers without a Rewards ID. Each had different friction and different goals; designing each path explicitly is what made adoption flow naturally.
"No reported loss in traffic" as the relaunch bar
For a site this large, a relaunch isn't a hero moment — it's a high-wire act. Holding the line on continuity, backward compatibility, and stability in the design (not just in QA) was what made the cutover land without disruption.
What changed
Specific metrics covered in the full case study (request access below). Public-facing highlights:
The Product Finder UI I designed is still in production on the AutoZone site, and has expanded into additional product categories since launch.
Full site relaunch shipped with no reported loss in traffic at cutover — the rare outcome on a relaunch of this scale.
AZ Rewards flows that cleanly handle every combination of known/unknown/signed-in customer state.
Onboarded and mentored junior and associate designers — leadership work that compounded across the team.
What I'd carry forward
Confidence is the conversion lever. In an e-commerce category where the customer is asking "will this fit?", anything that removes ambiguity at the moment of decision is worth designing carefully.
Designing every state is the work. Loyalty and account-state flows fail when they're built around the happy path. Knowing exactly which state a user is in — and designing for it explicitly — is what makes adoption feel inevitable.
Leading a design team is a separate craft from doing design. Mentorship, approvals, and onboarding aren't overhead — they're how a senior designer scales their impact.
Want to see the actual work?
The complete AutoZone portfolio — Product Finder screens across breakpoints, AZ Rewards state flows, and detail on the relaunch — is available as a password-protected PDF. Drop your details and I'll send it over.