KASS YASSIN
Case Study
Company: Zapata AI
Date:
Role: Product Design Lead
As the Lead Product Designer, I led the design of Orquestra Portal, a deeply technical platform for researchers, academic institutions, and customers to explore running algorithms and machine learning models on quantum computers.
By their nature, quantum algorithms are usually part of a larger "workflow" of tasks that run on both classical and quantum computers, and the platforms purpose was primarily to act as a single place where engineers could orchestrate their data, algorithms, models, and compute resources across their team.
As customers of these solutions were often non-technical, the platform also supported visualising data and querying it through dashboards and interactive plots, and one of my main challenges as a design lead was to bridge the gap between the deeply technical world of quantum computing, and the more business focused end customer.
My key responsibilities included:
Conducting user research to identify friction points and opportunities for improvement.
Facilitating cross-functional workshops to align on solutions and prioritize features.
Creating PRDs (Product Requirements Documents) to ensure clarity and alignment across teams.
Designing and testing prototypes to validate functionality and usability.
Bridging the gap between design, engineering, and product teams to deliver a seamless user experience.
When I first joined Zapata, my first task was to help make the existing VS Code extension more intuitive.
Through initial research, I identified several opportunities:
Complex installation and onboarding processes that hindered adoption.
Limited collaboration features for teams working on shared quantum computing projects.
Lack of a centralized platform to manage teams and workflows efficiently.
Files being downloaded and manipulated locally on device.
A lot of manual work to turn the results being run on the platform into meaningful plots and graphs that could be understood and queried by less expert users.
Armed with these insights, and with the support of my product director, we campaigned the leadership team to invest in building a web-based solution that would live in the cloud and make it easier for quantum software engineers and customers to use the platform. The result was Orquestra Portal!
User Research & Opportunity Identification:
Conducted interviews and mapped workflows to understand user pain points.
Discovered an opportunity to migrate to a cloud-based web platform.
Cross-Team Workshops:
Facilitated workshops in two stages:
Ideation: Exploring potential solutions and opportunities.
Prioritization: Ranking ideas by user value and engineering effort.
Aligned stakeholders and engineering teams on a roadmap for features.
Prototyping & Testing:
Designed rapid prototypes to visualize workflows and validate solutions with users.
Conducted user testing to gather feedback and iterate on designs.
PRDs and UX Tickets:
in the absence of a product manager on the team (I sat within a small and scrappy team called 'UX Engineering") I took the opportunity to lean into my product management knowledge:
Wrote detailed PRDs to clarify objectives, requirements, and success metrics.
Linked PRDs to UX tickets to bridge gaps between product, design, and engineering.
Documentation & Handoff:
Created final designs and documentation for development teams.
Built reusable UI components for scalability and consistency.
User Experience:
Migrated 100% of users from the VS Code extension to the new cloud-based platform.
Reduced installation and onboarding times from hours to minutes.
Boosted satisfaction, efficiency, and quality of life for quantum software engineers using the platform.
Opened up the platform to our first non-technical users: teams within BP, DARPA, and Andretti Autosport.
Business Impact:
Enabled the deprecation of the VS Code extension, resulting in significant budget savings.
Opened up the platform for external customers to use directly for the first time.
Customer Projects:
Aside from working on Orquestra Portal, I also contributed to customer projects by helping explore their use cases and designing custom interfaces, visualization tools, and dashboards for their bespoke needs.
The customer project I was most deeply involved with was our partnership with Andretti Autosport, where I led customer touch points and weekly design calls with the customer to plan and review progress on the interface we were building - a suite of realtime dashboards for running predictive analytics and simulations ahead of races.
In 2024, successfully Zapata merged with Andretti Global to become one of the first quantum computing companies to go public on the stock market, reflecting the strong work we delivered during the partnership.
Kass Yassin 2024
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