Building Veza
I designed the core product from zero at a company acquired by ServiceNow for $1.6B.
Veza is an identity security platform that answers one critical question: who has access to what? Think of the 2020 Twitter hack, an attacker exploited an employee’s access to sensitive accounts. Veza makes those invisible permission chains visible, giving organizations a way to audit and control exactly what their users can do across systems like AWS, databases, and cloud services.
Role: Founding and only designer. I owned the visual language, interaction patterns, navigation, and core product flows from the ground up.
Mission: When I joined, there was no real product — only a demo on fake data. My job was to turn that into a working experience: making complex identity permissions visible, understandable, and actionable.
Before
AfterAccess Graph
Veza's Access Graph is a visual map that connects who (humans, machines, AI agents) can access what (data, apps, cloud resources) across an entire tech stack. The hard part wasn't drawing nodes and edges, it was translating messy, system-specific permissions into something people could actually reason about.
A few of the design problems I had to solve:
Effective Permissions: Surface true access by unraveling nested groups, role assumptions, and conditional policies — without drowning the user in every intermediate hop.
Multi-System Mapping: One coherent graph across 300+ systems (AWS, Azure, Salesforce, Snowflake, and more), each with its own permission model and vocabulary.
Natural Language Search: Let people ask questions like "Which users can delete my S3 buckets?" and land on a visual map of the blast radius — not a raw query builder.
Risk Heatmaps & Time Travel: Make over-permissioned accounts and permission drift obvious: spot risk at a glance, then compare graphs over time to see exactly what changed.
Here are a few examples of problems and design solutions I worked through for the Access Graph.
Beyond the Access Graph
The Access Graph was the centerpiece, but the product needed a full UI around it — navigation, tables, reports, visualizations, and the supporting surfaces that make a complex platform usable day to day.
My impact
Designed the entire product from scratch — no prior design system, no existing UI.
The Access Graph shipped and remained structurally unchanged after my departure; engineering built on top of my layout and visual logic rather than replacing it.
ServiceNow acquired Veza for $1.6B — buying the product I’d designed from scratch.