A Salesforce design leader hasn't opened Figma in months. Her team builds first and researches after — and she says that's the right bet.
Shir leads the Sales Planning design organisation within Salesforce's Sales Cloud, where her team no longer designs in Figma — they prototype and ship directly through AI coding tools instead. She and Jochem dig into what's actually shifting as design, product, and engineering roles blur together, why her team has chosen to build first and learn from real usage rather than front-load research, and where that bet risks brand trust, design-system consistency, and runaway token spend.
ABOUT SHIR
Shir leads the Sales Planning design organisation within Salesforce's Sales Cloud, where she's building out a new product initiative from the ground up. She's based in the Netherlands, though most of her design organisation sits in San Francisco. Over roughly the past two years she's moved her team almost entirely off Figma, working instead directly in AI coding environments like VS Code and Cursor alongside engineers and PMs, with GitHub as the shared collaboration surface. She's candid about what that shift has cost — slower discovery, fraying design-system consistency — as much as what it's unlocked.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Salesforce's design team no longer designs in Figma — they build directly in AI coding tools instead.
Moving fast means discovery keeps losing to delivery, even when everyone knows the risk.
PMs who thought AI made designers optional quickly learned good-looking flows aren't good experiences.
Shipping fast and learning from real customers can beat exhaustive research — if you can stomach the mess.
AI-era design systems are fraying because there's no shared library when everyone builds solo.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
00:37 Ditching Figma: Salesforce design's move to full AI-native prototyping
02:22 How roles are blurring across design, product, and engineering
05:03 Two models of convergence: PM-led versus design-led prototyping
09:29 Inside Salesforce Sales Cloud: where discovery and delivery are splitting
13:04 Building over learning: has discovery lost its place as step one?
17:45 The "spaghetti on the wall" problem: speed, trust, and brand erosion
22:26 The risk of a building-first culture drowning out research's warnings
25:25 Where the line is: protecting the core job to be done
28:44 Token spend as the new variable cost nobody's pricing yet
35:03 What Shir would change: design systems, GitHub, and a year of uncertainty
41:15 Staying one product: Slack, MCPs, and ecosystem cohesion
44:32 Where Shir's attention goes next — and why not everything needs to connect
LINKEDIN
Guest: Shir — https://www.linkedin.com/in/shirzalzberg/ Host: Jochem van der Veer — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jochemvanderveer/
THEYDO
Learn more about Journey Management with TheyDo: https://www.theydo.com
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