Senior Staff Product Designer

XiaoSeanLu

Human–AI SystemsTrust ArchitectureIC + Design Leadership

I architect the Confidence Bridge — where machine intelligence and human trust meet. From Tesla's physical autonomy era to Intuit's cognitive autonomy era, my work asks one question: what makes intelligence feel human?


About

Design as an act of trust-building

"The most interesting design problem of our time is the trust gap between humans and AI systems. I'm working on it every day."

14 years designing high-stakes decisions — EVs, taxes, AI systems. From Tesla's physical autonomy era to Intuit's cognitive one, I've learned that confidence is the product. My job is building the layer where machine intelligence and human trust meet.

Design Philosophy
Atoms to Agency
Physical autonomy to cognitive autonomy. Hardware set the foundation for confidence. AI is the multiplier.
Leadership Model
The Unified Lead
In the trenches with my team.
I design, I lead, I ship; hands in it, not above it.
Identity
The Cyborg-Realist
Not optimist, not skeptic.
I design what the gap between human and machine actually needs.

Work

The work, chapter by chapter

Intuit · TurboTax Business Tax
Senior Staff UX Designer

The Cognitive Autonomy era. I’m building the trust layer between small business owners and the AI that’s supposed to help them. Expert matching, agentic expense recs, an AI co-pilot experience — all asking the same question: what does it take for a person to actually hand the wheel to a machine?

Oct 2024 — Present
TaxScope — Free Tax Estimator
TaxScope — The Tax Estimator Nobody Had Built Yet.

Nobody had built an honest tax estimator. No paywall, no signup, no hand-waving. I stayed up and built it.

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0→1Open Source
Industry Expert Matching — The Right Expert, Inevitable
Industry Expert Matching — The Right Expert, Inevitable

Trust scales through recognition, not search. I built the system that makes the right expert feel inevitable.

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AI/LLMPattern System
GenAI Expenses — Architecting Agentic Trust
GenAI Expenses — Architecting Agentic Trust

Generic checklists don't build trust. Knowing you're a nail salon owner before you type it does.

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GenAIPersonalization
Tesla · Product Discovery
Design Manager & Staff UX Designer

The Physical Autonomy era. I built the team that built the digital face of Tesla — from Model 3 Highland’s launch across 35 countries to Cybertruck’s reservation engine to the app that turned owners into an audience. Four years, seven designers, zero legacy to lean on.

Mar 2020 — Oct 2024
Tesla Discovery Team
The Unified Lead — Building the Discovery Team

Zero team, zero playbook. Four years later — seven generalists behind everything Tesla’s world sees.

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LeadershipCulture
Tesla Model 3 Highland
Model 3 Highland — Orchestrating a Global Shift from Spec to Story

The best-selling EV got a quiet redesign. I built the launch that made the world feel the difference.

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Product DiscoveryGlobal
Cybertruck Unleashed
Cybertruck — As Bold on Screen as in Steel

I led the team that turned the most polarizing vehicle on earth into a digital experience that matched it.

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Product Discovery3D
Tesla Demo Drive
Demo Drive: Elevating the Test Drive Experience

Not the drives — the humans scheduling them. I built self-serve and the bottleneck vanished.

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Service Design
Tesla App Newsfeed
Tesla App Newsfeed — Discovery Engine

A lock/unlock app is a utility. I built the layer that made it a discovery engine instead.

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AppService Design
PayPal · Commerce Platform
Senior UX Designer

The Commerce Infrastructure era. I learned that complexity is never the user’s problem to solve — it’s mine. The portal that gave 3K+ partners a single source of truth, the self-serve flow that cleared a 14,000-ticket backlog, the unified interface that made three tools think like one.

Feb 2017 — Mar 2020
Marketplace Insights
Marketplace Insights — From Fragmented to Clear

Five dashboards, no shared truth, and 3K+ partners navigating alone. I built the one place they’d actually trust.

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0→1B2B Platform
Partner Platform — Portal and Configuration
Partner Platform — From 14K Backlog to One Coherent System

Partners couldn't get in, and the tools inside were broken. I fixed both ends — the portal that cleared the backlog and the interface that unified it.

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Self-ServeSystems Design

Experience
Senior Staff UX DesignerIntuit · TurboTax Business Tax
2024–Present
Design Manager & Staff UX DesignerTesla · Discovery Team
2020–2024
Senior UX DesignerPayPal · Commerce Platform
2017–2020
Product DesignerTango Me · Social Media Platform
2016–2017
UX & UI DesignerMacate Group · Enterprise Software
2015–2016
User Experience DesignerNetApp · Information Engineering
2013–2015
View PDF Resume
Contact
Let's design something
people lean into.

Open to design leadership, principal IC, and hybrid roles — anywhere AI, trust, and human experience intersect.

Full Experience
Xiao Sean Lu
Senior Staff UX Designer · Human–AI Systems · Trust Design
I design the confidence layer between humans and intelligent systems. Across Tesla and Intuit TurboTax, I’ve led design from the trenches — building teams, defining AI interaction patterns, and delivering experiences that make intelligence feel trustworthy. IC craft and design leadership, simultaneously, at scale.
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Experience
Intuit · TurboTax Business Tax · Mountain View, CA
Oct 2024 – Present
Senior Staff UX Designer
  • Led end-to-end UX strategy for TurboTax Business Tax and DIWM — defining a unified design vision across onboarding, AI-driven expert matching, agentic expense recommendations, and post-file engagement, contributing to measurable gains in conversion and a $115M incremental revenue target
  • Drove industry-specific expert matching from concept to production — establishing design frameworks that scaled across 20+ industry categories, improving start-to-complete rate ~+10% and revenue per visitor ~+10%
  • Led three simultaneous DIWM product launches at season — pre-auth expert matching, expert reconnect, and smart bookmarks — recognized by VP leadership for delivering 3 brand-new experiences at once
  • Partnered with AI and data science teams to establish LLM-driven personalization patterns for Schedule C filers, closing a $1,800 deduction confidence gap between DIY and expert-assisted customers
  • Co-defined the BizTax end-to-end design vision with senior leadership — establishing the north-star strategy that informed CEO-level alignment and the FY26 4× new units strategic intent
  • Designed and shipped TaxScope independently — a 0→1 free tax estimator covering 60+ job types in one night, zero backend, directly addressing a gap uncovered in internal customer research
Tesla · Product Discovery · Fremont, CA
Mar 2020 – Oct 2024
Staff UX Designer & Design Manager
  • Built Tesla Discovery from 0 to 1 — hired and led a team of 7 deep generalists, driving cohesive design across product releases, brand awareness, and customer engagement for Tesla.com and the Tesla app globally
  • Drove key UX initiatives across product teams — spearheading Model 3 Highland's global launch across 35+ countries in 8 weeks and Cybertruck's digital reveal that generated 250k+ pre-orders and became the internal template for future launches
  • Established comprehensive design and research methodologies to measure success — including Demo Drive's A/B self-serve system (28.4% conversion lift, 337% volume growth, $149M modeled impact) and Help Me Choose (1.37M sessions, 95.98% completion rate)
  • Transformed the Tesla app from a utility into a discovery engine — designing the editorial Newsfeed layer that drove 2.7× events/user and 104K events, deepening the relationship between owners and the brand
  • Contributed to design and sales leadership summits — collaborating with product VPs and senior executives on forward-looking planning; rebuilt Tesla Investor Relations across 6 digital surfaces, enabling full IR independence from engineering
PayPal · Commerce Platform · San Jose, CA
Feb 2017 – Mar 2020
Senior UX Designer
  • Led end-to-end experience design for PayPal Commerce Platform — driving strategic planning and coordination across teams to deliver an industry-leading self-serve onboarding system that unlocked a 14,000-partner backlog and served a growing ecosystem of 3K+ active partners
  • Identified customer needs and business goals to determine optimal UX direction — establishing common design and research methods in harmony with Agile methodology and user-centered design practices across cross-functional teams
  • Proposed and helped implement a unified interface across three configuration tools — collapsing disparate mental models into a single shared grammar; contributed to building a World-Class UED Community of Practice
Tango Me · Social Platform · Mountain View, CA
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017
Product Designer
  • Redesigned and launched "Add Friends" within the first 2 weeks — resulted in 20% increase in DAU
  • Contributed to high-level product strategic decisions; transferred broad concepts into shipped features for millions of users
NetApp · Information Engineering · Sunnyvale, CA
Apr 2013 – Sep 2015
User Experience Designer
  • Generated illustration systems and guidelines guiding users through complex tasks — increased customer installation and maintenance efficiency by 40%
  • Created illustrations including isometric drawings, conceptual diagrams, and icons; developed and evolved the design system for the organization
Education
University of California, Davis
Bachelor of Arts in Design
Design Practice
Product DesignInteraction DesignInformation ArchitectureDesign SystemsRapid PrototypingUser ResearchE2E Customer Journeys0→1 Product DesignDesign Scalability
AI & Emerging Systems
Agentic AI WorkflowsAI-Assisted DevelopmentLLM Interaction PatternsTrust ArchitectureHuman-AI CoexistenceNon-Deterministic UX
Strategy & Leadership
Design StrategyExecutive InfluenceSystems ThinkingBehavioral PsychologyManaging Deep GeneralistsCross-Functional Collaboration
Tools
FigmaGitHubClaude CodeCursorAdobe Creative SuiteJiraConfluence
Certifications & Awards
IntuitSpotlight Award · Customer Obsession · 2026
IntuitSpotlight Award · Customer Obsession · 2025
IntuitSpotlight Award · Stronger Together · 2025
TeslaSPARC: Driven · 2024
TeslaSPARC: Leads with Purpose · 2023
TeslaSPARC: Innovative · 2022
TeslaSPARC: Dependable · 2021
PayPalBadge: Commitment, Collaboration & Innovation · 2018
PayPalSpot Award: Leading Global Design Summit · 2017
CooperCertificate: Crafting Strategic Narratives · 2017