Principal Product Designer — Intuit for Education

James Barraza

I design at the seam of product and engineering — using AI to move from concept to working code.

01 / Approach

Design in
the codebase

Instead of handing off static mockups, I iterate on live components alongside engineers — branching from GitHub, opening pull requests, and reviewing in the real product.

CursorClaudeGitHub / PRs Builder.ioChatGPTGeminiNotebookLM

PR #248 — refine onboarding card

// components/OnboardingCard.tsx padding: 16px; border-radius: 4px; padding: 24px; border-radius: 12px; transition: transform .3s ease; // designed → coded → reviewed in one loop Merged by james-barraza

02 / Work

Selected
experience

2022—Now

Principal Product Designer

Lead designer for the Intuit Education Platform. Own end-to-end vision across teacher, student, and admin experiences — driving iteration inside the codebase via Cursor, Claude, and GitHub PRs.

2018—22

Senior Product Designer

Shipped core flows — selection, navigation, onboarding, dashboards. Advanced the mobile design system on the TurboTax app, used by millions.

2017—18

Senior UX / XD Designer

Lead designer on the Antibody vertical — synthesized a scientist's full experimental journey and re-imagined search for faster purchasing.

2016—17

UX / UI Designer

Prototypes, hi-fidelity designs, and animations for SaaS startups — Quip, Salesforce, Infobip, Mindflash, Savanti.

2014—16

Lead UX / Senior UI

Designed experiences for national and international multi-family housing clients; built complex custom sites with the dev team.

03 / About

About

Principal product designer with 10+ years shaping products used by millions — from TurboTax to scientific research tools. I work where design meets engineering, using AI tooling to close the gap between intent and shipped code.

Capabilities

Product Strategy · Design Systems · Design Leadership · UX Research · Prototyping · Mobile Design · Motion

Education

Mobile Web / App Design — Portfolio MasterClass, 2013

A.A., Digital Graphic Design — Art Institute of California–San Diego, 2007–09

JB / 04Contact

Let's
work →

Always happy to talk about design, AI workflows, or interesting product problems.

Email [email protected] →

Compose email→ LinkedIn↗

San Diego County, CA Available for principal / staff design roles & advisory