Robert V. Burton

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OPERATIONAL SYSTEMS LEADER · SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA · ROBERTVBURTON.COM

Robert V.

Burton

I build operational systems that help product, design, and engineering organizations scale with greater speed, quality, and alignment.

Product Operations

Design Systems

AI-Enabled Workflow Strategy

Organizational Scale

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15+

years across design ops, enterprise SaaS delivery, and media operations

4

platforms governed by one design system: Web, iOS, Windows, X-Pages

~4 wks

idea to live pilot for Caffeine, an AI-built automation engine

1,022

automated tests behind that engine

HOW I WORK

Three operating modes

Each case study below shows one of these. Together they describe what a systems architect does that a process manager does not.

GOVERN AT SCALE

Make the system the default path

Intake, prioritization, delivery, and QA designed so teams on every platform can move without asking permission.

Sunrise Design System · HoloKit · AG Grid

BUILD WHEN NO TOOL FITS

Ship purpose-built infrastructure

When off-the-shelf tools force workarounds, I design and build what the workflow actually needs.

Caffeine · Atlas UX · Jira Tracker

CUT THE COORDINATION TAX

Use AI where humans relay information

AI applied to status chasing, handoffs, and retrospectives, so people spend time on judgment.

Fora · UX Arch · X-Pages semantic layer

SELECTED WORK · VEEVA SYSTEMS

Case studies

BUILD WHEN NO TOOL FITS · AI-BUILT

Caffeine

An automation engine that turns product managers' screenshot requests into finished, device-framed screenshots for Veeva's Summit conference decks. A designer pastes one Figma link. Caffeine does the rest.

ROLE

Owner, end to end: process, tooling, rollout, support

TIMELINE

About 4 weeks, idea to live pilot

BUILT WITH

Node, TypeScript, Figma API, Asana, Google Drive, Claude Code

STATUS

Live pilot, 2026 EU Summit cycle

THE PROBLEM

Twice a year, PMs send roadmap decks with dozens of slides needing new product screenshots. Every one was made by hand.

• Scattered intake. Red callouts on slides, emails, and chats, with no single owner.
• Inconsistent output. Hand-placed device frames meant corners, status bars, and the AI button varied shot to shot.
• No delivery trail. Files lived in ad hoc folders. PMs couldn't see status.
• Peak load. Requests piled up right before Summit, on top of product work.

MY APPROACH

• Process first. Mapped the PM to UX to PM loop and cut the designer's job down to pasting one link.
• No new tools for anyone. Asana stayed the system of record.
• Built with AI. Wrote the engine and web app with Claude Code as pair programmer. I set the architecture, rules, and acceptance criteria.
• Respected shared systems. Device templates stayed with the design system team. The shared tracker was never restructured.
• Shipped, then hardened. Live pilot on real requests, daily fixes backed by regression tests.

01 INPUT

PM deck

slides read by Claude

02 INTAKE

Asana request

owner auto-assigned

03 ENGINE

Caffeine

polls every minute

1 subtask per frame

04 FRAMING

Device frame

pixel-exact mask

05 REVIEW

Drive

Review → Final

06 DELIVER

PM email

draft ready

guardrails: actionable flags, Reprocess switch, "@Caffeine status"

Designer's only step: paste a Figma link at 02

The PM to UX to PM loop after Caffeine. Asana remains the system of record throughout.

RESULTS · FIRST EU SUMMIT CYCLE

The bigger win is consistency. Every screenshot uses the official frames, status bar, and AI button placement. Every request has an owner, a status, and a Drive link.

HARD PROBLEMS SOLVED

• Pixel-exact device masks. Fixed corner radii left gaps at iPhone corners and the Dynamic Island. Masks are now flood-filled from each frame's own screen hole, so every template defines its own shape.
• The AI button. Placement varied, and one template had it baked in. Caffeine strips it and overlays a clean design-system version at a fixed position, driven by one Yes/No field.
• Automation that doesn't spam. Flags are keyed to the specific frame and reason, so each posts once, even across restarts.
• Messy real-world input. Mixed devices, odd widths, links in the wrong field. Each case gets a clear, actionable flag instead of a silent failure.

WHAT'S NEXT

A self-service screenshot library for PMs, mixed-device requests from a single ask, and a move from pilot to a hosted service reusable every Summit.

GOVERN AT SCALE

Sunrise Design System

One design system serving Web, iOS, Windows, and X-Pages. My work is the operating layer that lets it scale across four platforms without becoming a bottleneck.

ROLE

Design system operations and governance lead

SCOPE

4 platforms, multiple feature squads

STATUS

Ongoing

WHAT I BUILT

• Governance model. Clear rules for what belongs in the system and what stays with feature squads.
• Intake framework. One front door for component requests from every platform.
• Prioritization logic. Sprint-level priority tracking across releases, including a grid component roadmap maintained outside Jira's limits.
• Delivery pipeline and QA layer. Pre-handoff design reviews and a dedicated UX QA pass before components ship.

DECISIONS THAT SHOW THE MODEL WORKING

• Handing off, on purpose. Moved a component with a single consumer to the squad that uses it, with DS support retained. The system stays lean.
• Ownership by default. Agreed with design leadership that feature rollout of shared patterns is owned by squads, prioritized by PM and UX.
• Shared AI components. Led the effort to identify which AI experience elements (prompt input, sidebar, actions) become shared components across three AI surfaces, after parallel workstreams produced duplicates.

BUILD WHEN NO TOOL FITS

Atlas UX

A design-phase ticketing system I designed and built for the UX organization, replacing a general project tool that forced constant workarounds.

ROLE

Primary builder: architecture, development, roadmap

BUILT WITH

Next.js, Postgres, Prisma

STATUS

In use internally

ARCHITECTURE CHOICES

• Many-to-many tickets and projects. Design work rarely belongs to one project. The data model stopped pretending it does.
• Projects as promoted views. A project is a saved, elevated view of tickets, which removes duplication.
• Archive, never delete. Reference data stays intact for audit and history.

WHAT IT DOES

Full ticket lifecycle, subtasks, comments, an activity audit trail, and role-based person fields. I ran the feature gap analysis and set the roadmap: archive, onboarding view, rotating auto-assignment, and staleness notifications. It now tracks design system work including the HoloKit migration epic.

CUT THE COORDINATION TAX

Fora

An AI-powered retrospective intelligence platform. It uses AI to remove the coordination overhead that eats operational capacity and crowds out strategic thinking.

ROLE

Concept, product design, build

FOCUS

Retrospectives and team learning

Retrospectives produce insight that rarely survives the meeting. Patterns across sprints and teams go unseen because synthesizing them is manual work nobody has time for. Fora treats that synthesis as an AI job, so leaders see recurring friction early and teams spend retro time deciding, not transcribing.

CUT THE COORDINATION TAX

UX Arch

A Claude-powered, machine-readable record of design decisions that automates design-to-engineering handoff across Vault Web, iOS, and Windows.

ROLE

Design operations lead on a 5-person pilot team

BUILT WITH

Claude Code slash commands, GitLab

STATUS

Pilot scoping

The same feature often gets designed and built independently per platform, and the reasoning behind decisions lives in people's heads. UX Arch makes that reasoning a shared, queryable artifact. I scoped the pilot tightly: two jobs (spec and design agreement, then engineering handoff), one platform, one real feature, with a working repo and Claude Code commands as the foundation.

ALSO IN THE SYSTEM

More operational work

STRATEGY

X-Pages design system strategy

Reduced dependency on platform components and defined a semantic layer AI tools can read, so Claude Code can accelerate dev cycles.

MIGRATION

HoloKit migration

Set up and track the epic moving the design system into a new component kit, with clear ownership of grid rules.

GOVERNANCE

Data grid prioritization

Ran grid component priorities across sprint releases and pushed shared-component fixes over one-off workarounds under deadline pressure.

DELIVERY

Rich Text Editor, Windows and iOS

Served as squad PM for a new cross-platform editor component, managing validation rules and downstream consumer dependencies.

PLATFORM

iOS compliance and adaptive layout

Drove iOS 26 portrait-mode compliance work, set up pre-review gates, and drafted adaptive layout principles for windowed and multitasking modes.

TOOLING

Jira Tracker and onboarding

Built a local app to prioritize epic boards, and a reusable onboarding template that gets new UX hires productive faster.

OPERATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

Operations as a living system

Governance should accelerate, not block. Visibility should inform, not burden. AI should reduce coordination tax, not add to it.

I think about operations the way hydrologists think about rivers. A good operational system is a channel shaped to the volume, velocity, and character of what flows through it.

Where the channel narrows, pressure builds. Where boulders interrupt flow, rapids form and demand attention. The job is to read the current width and depth of the organization and design a flow that is sustainable for that moment.

This is a framework for proportionality. A startup needs a narrow, fast channel. An enterprise needs wider structure with load-bearing governance. The common mistake is applying yesterday's channel to tomorrow's volume.

PRINCIPLES I RETURN TO

1. Operational quality is designed, not discovered. Governance should remove the need to ask permission. Design systems are organizational infrastructure. Visibility without overhead marks a mature operating model. AI should reduce the coordination tax on people, not replicate it.

WHAT SETS THIS APART

Most operators manage process. I architect systems.

PROCESS MANAGER

SYSTEMS ARCHITECT

Optimizes what exists

Redesigns what is possible

Reduces friction locally

Removes the conditions that create friction

Reports on delivery

Builds visibility that makes insight automatic

Adopts the tools available

Builds the tool when none fits

CAREER ARC

From design operations to organizational systems

The pipelines I built kept connecting more of the organization. The title stayed the same. The scope did not.

EARLIER · EVIA

Media operations

Ran production operations for enterprise live events and podcasts for Microsoft, AWS, and Salesforce. High stakes, fixed deadlines, no second takes.

VEEVA SYSTEMS

Design operations

Senior Design Operations Manager for Vault CRM. Sprint planning, design system governance, tooling, and cross-functional coordination with engineering and PM.

NOW

Operational systems strategy

Governing a four-platform design system and shipping AI-built operational tools. The work has become systems architecture.

ROLES I'M PURSUING

Head of Product Operations

Director, Design Operations

Platform Operations Lead

Design Program Leadership

AI Workflow and Ops Strategy

CONTACT

Let's talk systems.

Open to senior Product Operations, Design Operations, and Platform Operations leadership roles at scaling SaaS organizations.

cplburton@gmail.com

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Robert V. Burton · Operational Systems Leader

robertvburton.com · Corona, California