STUDIO NĀZ — FRACTIONAL DESIGN LEADERSHIP
// 01 The work
I'm Behnaz Babazadeh. For fourteen years I've stepped into product orgs that needed to ship better than their design maturity could handle, and rebuilt the way they make things.
Today I run Studio Nāz as an embedded fractional design leader. I show up in your Slack, your Figma, your standups. I set the bar, build the system, modernize the workflow with AI, and leave the place running with one less excuse.
Less consulting from a distance. More running the design org with you, while it ships.
Embedded across a small portfolio of growth-stage clients: GatherAI, and now Cureate Connect. The work spans design systems, AI-native workflows, 0 → 1 product, and the operating standards a modern design org needs to ship at speed without losing the bar.
Conversion up +15% across AT&T, Clover, and ADT. Another +24% on the funnels we rebuilt around clearer mental models. I introduced the AI-design-to-code pipeline that doubled design throughput and made engineering 6× faster on new funnels by standardizing tokens, components, and specs.
Spent six years convincing them they were. The Figma system grew to 500+ components. Dev efficiency rose +45%. Adoption climbed +90%. The work touched roughly $300M in ARR. Three distributed teams, GDPR and CCPA constraints, trust stitched into every release. I left having quietly turned a UX function into operational leverage.
Started in agencies, learned to design under deadline, learned that taste compounds. A Master's in Design & Technology at Parsons, and the conviction that systems thinking is the work, not the leftover.
// WORKING THESIS
06 BELIEFS / 14 YRS
“ The work that moves a number tends to be the work that respects how the team thinks, what the customer expects, and where AI can do the boring parts faster than anyone you'd hire. — B. Babazadeh, 2026
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