# Christian Baptiste > Head of Design & Product Strategy | Architecting Next-Gen UX & AI Solutions that Drive Revenue Growth and Customer Retention Location: Walnut Creek, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/christianbaptiste As a visionary Product Design Executive, I have over 27 years of experience building and scaling high-performing design organizations that drive business growth. I specialize in leading design strategy for next-gen technology, particularly at the intersection of AI, SaaS, and enterprise solutions. As Head of Design at Five9, I led the design of an industry-defining AI CX suite, including Agentic Virtual Agents and a first-to-market native live Agent Assist with AI Guidance, Automated Tasks, AI RAG Knowledge, Post-Interaction Summaries, and AI Insights. This work was instrumental in shaping our design strategy, guiding cross-functional alignment, and bringing solutions to market that significantly enhanced usability and customer adoption. My expertise is built on several key pillars: Strategic Leadership: I build efficient, collaborative teams and foster a "level up together" culture that accelerates product development. I believe that inclusion sparks the best ideas by integrating diverse perspectives, and I'm skilled at aligning teams to shared goals for customer success. AI & Technology Innovation: I have a deep understanding of AI, ML, and data-driven solutions, allowing me to translate cutting-edge technology into tangible, impactful experiences. I've also led efforts to unify product portfolios, generating significant cost savings and simplifying the customer experience. Design Systems & Processes: As a Figma Master with a proven track record of implementing comprehensive design systems and component libraries (over 5,800 Figma and React components). These initiatives have significantly enhanced production efficiency and improved UX consistency. User-Centric Validation: As an expert in Design Thinking and User-Centered Design, I ensure products are tailored to the needs of diverse user groups through research, journey mapping, persona development, and testing. Reporting & Analytics: I have extensive experience building world-class analytics tools and dashboards that transform complex data into actionable business intelligence. At Five9, I led the unification of four disparate reporting and analytics systems, generating an annual savings of $2M. My career spans various industries—including Commerce, CRM, Marketing and many more, allowing me to adapt quickly to new market challenges and apply cross-industry insights to solve complex problems. I am passionate about delivering products that not only delight users but also advance organizational objectives. I thrive at the intersection of design, technology, leadership, and business strategy. ## Work Experience ### Director Of Product Design and UX @ Five9 Jan 2021 – Jan 2025 | San Ramon, California, United States Team Leadership & Development • Built High-Performing Teams: Scaled and transformed product design teams, increasing production by 500% through process and skill optimization. • Fostered Collaborative Culture: Instituted a "level-up together" approach with bi-weekly sessions and quarterly retrospectives to promote collaborative learning and shared knowledge. • Driven Efficiency: Achieved full backlog burndown, ensuring timely delivery. • User-Centric Philosophy: Championed a user-focused "design for the bookends" approach, ensuring user-friendly applications for all levels of expertise. Cross-Team Achievements & Contributions • Full Portfolio: Provided design leadership for over 25 internal and external applications, collaborating with more than 55 product managers and large dev teams. • Design System & Front-End Leadership: Spearheaded the creation of a comprehensive design system with over 5,800 Figma and React Storybook components. This resulted in a 10-fold production efficiency improvement, enhanced UX consistency, and 98% WCAG compliance. Recent Achievements & Contributions • Strategic Product & AI Innovation: Pioneering groundbreaking CX Agent software with full omni-channel and native AI-assisted experiences. Led the design of Five9's industry-defining AI suite, which includes Agentic virtual AI Agents, and first-to-market native live Agent Assist (with AI guidance, automated tasks, AI (RAG) knowledge lookup, automated quality management (AQM), AI Insights, “Talk to your data,” and post-interaction summaries. The work also encompassed AI Admin applications for multi-model AI prompt creation and testing (GenAI Studio), intent and event rule builder, IVA flow builder (Studio), workflow automation (WFA), and MCP libraries. • Business Transformation & Cost Savings: Unified four disparate reporting systems, generating an annual savings of $2M by eliminating external vendor costs and enhancing reporting capabilities. ### VP of Experience and Senior Director of Product Design @ Corderum Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Corderum was a start up founded during the pandemic, providing a single platform for enterprise and SMB customers to manage employee and operational subscriptions with an emphasis on organizational expense management, product distribution, SSO, as well as managing private and public cloud operations and preventing shadow IT. - Spearheaded all facets of customer and employee experience, product design, product management, and business strategy for a new startup. - Directed user research and rapid prototyping, developing an interactive Proof of Concept (POC) instrumental in securing early investment capital and attracting key customer interest. - Established a comprehensive design system utilized across all prototypes, ensuring brand consistency and design efficiency. - Initiated and configured core Product Management, Design, and Development environments (Jira), streamlining cross-functional workflows. - Led weekly strategic discussions and facilitated user research, synthesizing insights directly into product discussions and investor presentations. - Oversaw the creation and maintenance of all marketing design content, including the corporate website, logo, marketechture, and pitch decks, while managing potential integration partner relationships. ### Director of User Experience and Design @ OmniSci / Heavy.AI Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area As a key leader, I hired and directed a team of product designers to create revolutionary enterprise and cloud analytics applications for Heavy.ai (formerly OmniSci). By harnessing the massive parallelism of modern GPU and CPU hardware, my team and I designed an interactive and real-time visual analytics experience. We focused on the 'bookends' of data analysis, developing innovative and delightful ways to extract insights from multi-billion record datasets in milliseconds. A core achievement was combining geospatial with millisecond precision date and time data, allowing users to effortlessly explore and uncover relationships within massive time-series and location-based information. Our work led to the design and creation of the most powerful cross-filtering and cohort creation tools of any analytics application, enabling users to instantly fuse and perform projections with clicks, not code. This allowed our customers to make high-impact decisions at unprecedented speeds. **Extending the Platform with ML, AI, and Advanced Analytics** My team's design also integrated advanced data science capabilities directly into the platform. We designed user experiences that made powerful predictive analytics and machine learning accessible on massive datasets, allowing users to move beyond historical analysis and into forecasting. Furthermore, we pioneered the user interface for HeavyIQ, an innovative AI-powered conversational analytics tool. ### Director of UX and Product Design @ Apttus/Conga Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | San Mateo CA applications like Quote-to-Cash (QTC) and B2B eCommerce, and pioneered a custom application builderthat empowered our customers to create unique quoting solutions for specialized verticals. which resulted in the platform being named a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant and scoring highest in all six categories. - Utilized a Design Thinking approach. I spearheaded the creation of a self-service B2B eCommerce platform with a consumer-grade user experience, introducing innovative features for bulk purchasing and product distribution. - Leading strategy efforts, I discovered opportunities to combine both full-service QTC with self services b2b e-commerce into a seamless experience. Using Storytelling techniques, my team and I evangelized this discovery, catching the attention of executives. - Developed and managed the Apttus design system to standardize components and streamline workflows, which ensured a consistent, high-quality user experience across all platform applications. ### Principal UX Designer and Product Design Lead @ IBM Commerce, Digital Analytics, Tealeaf, DemandTec Jan 2009 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area I was a Lead Product Designer and UX Lead, responsible for guiding a small team while also contributing as an individual contributor. My work spanned user experience, interaction design, user research, and visual design for web and mobile applications. Accomplishments Product Design: I led the design strategy, interfaces, and workflows for IBM's Digital Analytics application while also integrating applications like TeaLeaf, Coremetrics, and the suite of products acquired from DemandTec. At DemandTec, prior to its acquisition, I co-led the product design work for the entire portfolio of products used by leading global retailers, including Target, Nordstrom, and Walmart. My designs transformed complex, page-based flows into clean, data-focused, multi-panel UIs, enabling customers to analyze, filter, and act on vast amounts of retail data. UX Leadership: I successfully influenced the company to prioritize user experience and user research. I introduced methodologies like persona development and goal-based strategies, and implemented multi-iterative design processes. My designs were highly praised by customers for being intuitive, fast, and flexible. While at IBM, I led one of the teams that were first to implement IBM's "Hills" approach to Design Thinking. Design Systems: I played a key role in the development of what became IBM's Carbon design system. I was responsible for creating many innovative components, such as interactive date and time pickers, contextual filter tools, fail-safe form objects, dynamic infographics, data visualization solutions, custom dashboard components, and many others. And pre-acquisition I developed and managed the DemandTec design system, including building a a full library of components, styles and a component repository, icon collection. ### Fireworks Community Expert @ Adobe Community Expert Jan 2001 – Jan 2012 ### Principal UX and Product Design Lead @ SearchForce Inc. Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 Responsibilities and Accomplishments: At the forefront of a very small team of developers, we built the most sought-after paid search optimization application in a competitive industry, under seemingly unreachable deadlines. Highly recognized by my peers and by our customers for creating SearchForce’s easy to use, feature rich and extremely effective bid optimization RIA (Rich Internet Application). My rapid pace design execution comprised of researching search engine API’s & client information gathering to produce a multitude of daily prototypes that were used to decide product direction, development planning, negate potential development obstacles, test component ideas, study interaction, usability and feature effectiveness. While in our development cycle I would simultaneously work on skinning the application (Flex CSS and programmatic styling, .swf icon creation, etc.), and produce marketing material. ### Senior Web Designer - Front End Developer @ Roxio/Sonic Solutions Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 At Sonic Solutions/Roxio Responsibilities: Web design, XHTML, XML, DHTML, CSS, CSSP and JavaScript. Accomplishments: Revamped OEM sites like Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc. by creating an increased annual revenue from 25k to a 2 million, redesigned the Roxio.com home page increasing daily revenue by 7K per day, designed and built Roxio Labs, designed and built extremely successful Microsoft media player and Vista landing page, introduced new innovative expand content dhtml windows. Designed and implemented a central assets directory, introduced better work flow processes, implemented organic SEO methods that increased page rank even through a complete site redesign, reverse engineered both the Digital River shopping cart and the movable type blogging software to maintain the Roxio brand look and feel. Localized the cart and pages into 11 languages. ### Senior Web Designer - Front End Developer @ Siebel Systems Jan 2002 – Jan 2004 | San Mateo, California, United States ### Interaction Product Designer - Web Designer - Front-end Developer @ ZipSend Jan 1997 – Jan 2001 Blind Gift, ZipSend, then purchased by Frog Magic, eventually sorting names to be Frog Magic for the consumer store, and ZipSend for corp/technology. Our technology allowed users to send gifts with only the recipients email for delivery, we then contacted the recipient to notify that a gift await and ask for delivery info. The technology was popular with many popular dating sites, e-greeting sites and several IM clients like AOL, and Odigo. A second claim to fame we stumbled on during proof of concept marketing was later title VROOM, (Viral Registration Of Online Marketing). A couple hugely successful campaigns allowed users to send free gifts to friends using email addresses. We were one of the 1st to incorporate html emails. Lasting much longer than most .coms, eventually the burn rate caught up to our investor(Jarred Polis). I still believe that if we were more focused and we continued on creating the technology (like Digital River) we would have been successful. ## Education ### Computer Science and Basic Programing Skyline College ### Audio Engineering Los Medanos College ### Diablo Valley College ### Web Page in Digital/Multimedia and Information Resources Design, UX, Video Production Lynda.com ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/christianbaptiste - Portfolio: https://www.visionarydesigner.com/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/christianbaptiste JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/christianbaptiste/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13