Context
An 18-day sprint from concept to executive demo
In January 2025, my Sr. Director asked me to turn his vision for a persistent AI assistant — EVA — into a working prototype for PayPal's Leadership Summit. The CEO Staff Update was eighteen days away.
This wasn't a typical design project. There were no user pain points to solve, no time for interviews, no competitive analysis. The job was to bring a visionary concept to life in something polished enough to win executive buy-in and concrete enough to hand to engineering.
Process
Borrowing what works, designing what's missing
With the timeline this compressed, every hour of original design was an hour not spent shipping. I took inspiration from established LLM chat patterns — ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot — and grafted PayPal's brand language onto them. The goal: feel production-ready, not concept-rough.
Ten use cases, four from the brief and six self-initiated
Leadership provided four use cases. I added six more to demonstrate how EVA would actually live across an employee's day, from administrative work to leadership decisions:
- Order accessories
- Recap meetings
- Summarize feedback documents
- Chat summary
- Summarize enterprise URLs
- Summarize Excel documents
- Draft executive email
- Review pending approvals
- Manager: new hire experience
- HR: review hire candidates
The talent acquisition flow became the centerpiece of the promo video — it showed EVA collapsing a multi-day hiring decision into a single conversation.
The Product
A persistent assistant that meets employees inside their work
EVA lives in a docked panel summoned from a persistent icon — not a destination app — scoped to PayPal's internal systems: HR, IT, and company policy. Three of the ten flows, as designed:
Click any screen to enlarge.
Prototype
Interactive Figma walkthrough
All ten use cases connected in a single Figma prototype, with the conversational interface, content surfacing, and PayPal-system integration shown end-to-end.
What leadership said
"You accepted the challenge, managed the pressure effectively, and delivered high-quality outcomes. Hats off to you."Organization Leader EVA Project Sponsor
"Your commitment, creativity, and collaboration clearly demonstrated how we Win Together."Chief Technology Officer PayPal
Reflection
The valuable contribution isn't following the perfect process — it's delivering something tangible that moves the organization forward.
This project meant abandoning the traditional design playbook: no user research, no iterative testing, no stakeholder workshops. Instead I had to leverage existing patterns, trust my instincts, and focus ruthlessly on execution.
The constraints made me more decisive and more focused on what truly mattered. I wouldn't recommend this approach for every project — but proving I could deliver at this pace expanded my confidence and capabilities as a designer.