Resume

James C. E. Zabel

Senior Product Designer · UX & Design Leader · 15+ Years Experience

Fort Mill, SCjc.zabel@gmail.com(803) 984-5744jczabel.comLinkedIn

Experience

08

Microsoft

May 2026 – Present

Senior Product Designer

  • Lead UX for AI-powered, agentic experiences in Azure Advisor, Microsoft's recommendation engine that helps enterprise customers cut cloud cost, reduce risk, and modernize their workloads
  • Design workflows that turn long, generic recommendation lists into prioritized, contextual actions, so customers know what to fix first
  • Helped modernize authoring and governance for a catalog of ~1,700 recommendations, introducing AI-assisted drafting with human review to raise quality and consistency
  • Partner with platform and engineering teams to align AI interaction patterns, accessibility, and Responsible AI standards; also drive UX for CX Observe, internal tooling for customer-health insights

Microsoft

Apr 2023 – May 2026

Senior Design Manager

  • Managed and coached a multidisciplinary team of 6 designers and UX researchers across Azure Advisor, CX Observe, and customer-health products
  • Recognized with Azure X Manager of the Year for delivery results and people leadership
  • Translated ambiguous, cross-organization priorities into clear product direction and execution plans; influenced roadmap and investment decisions
  • Built alignment across product, engineering, research, and leadership while empowering the team to own major workstreams; elevated visibility through executive-ready storytelling

Microsoft

Feb 2022 – Apr 2023

Senior UX Designer

  • Led UX for internal Azure field platforms serving 4,000+ users across 10+ Microsoft organizations
  • Drove 175% monthly-active-user growth post-launch; supported outcomes tied to $25M+ projected revenue and $3M annual cost savings
  • Trusted IC partner to senior PM and engineering leaders; contributed to early AI/LLM exploration that shaped later agentic work

SnapOne (formerly SnapAV)

2020 – Feb 2022

Lead Data Analyst

  • Founding member of SnapOne's data team, turning insights from its connected IoT platforms into product strategy
  • Designed and launched data-insight experiences for customers, end customers, and internal stakeholders across SnapOne's platforms
  • Served as team scrum master, prioritizing product-development requests and partnering with product managers to define and refine asks
  • Delivered quarterly insight presentations to executives, proposing strategic decisions across all major SnapOne brands
  • Ran regular competitive analysis to keep brands market-relevant, and stood up NPS monitoring to channel customer feedback to product managers

SnapOne (formerly SnapAV)

Feb 2015 – 2020

UX Manager

  • Led UX for OvrC, an IoT cloud remote management platform supporting 20M+ managed devices globally
  • Led OvrC Home, a residential consumer app enabling homeowners to monitor and control smart home devices
  • Strategic design support for the $150M+ Connected Device category, driving double-digit growth annually
  • Managed onshore and offshore design teams; created standardized design system across all software interfaces
  • Planned and facilitated regular usability sessions with customers across both platforms

SnapOne (formerly SnapAV)

Aug 2013 – Feb 2015

User Experience Engineer

  • Early team member helping launch OvrC, a device management platform now supporting 20M+ IoT devices
  • Led offshore UI team utilizing AngularJS, HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, and WebSocket technologies
  • Created wireframes, prototypes, and flowcharts; conducted usability studies with clients to iterate design

Lockheed Martin

Nov 2011 – Aug 2013

Human Systems Integration Engineer

  • Principal investigator on usability assessments for Navy Ballistic Missile Defense 5.1 program
  • Used iterative design and heuristic evaluations to develop new GUIs introduced to fleet architecture
  • Gathered input from active duty sailors to resolve novel interface and layout problems

General Electric (Axiem Engineering)

2011

Human Factors Engineer

  • Risk assessments, Root Cause Analysis investigations, and Preliminary Hazard Assessments for new product development across multiple GE business units