Sanja Grbic is a senior product designer at Automattic working on Jetpack, WordPress.com, and WooCommerce. Her experiments in AI-assisted product design show how designers can build and deploy working software when organizations provide technical access, practical training, and room to experiment.
Originally from Belgrade, Grbic studied architecture before switching to graphic and interaction design. She worked in advertising, branding, and web design, founded Styleguide, a studio serving startups including healthcare companies, and worked at Blacklane and Issuu before joining Automattic’s Jetpack team. Her account of that progression describes a career grounded in both visual design and technical curiosity. At Automattic, she also wrote about collaboration across Jetpack’s distributed design team, emphasizing how shared workshops and stronger relationships improve product development.
During Radical Speed Month, an Automattic experiment in which roughly 500 employees initiated 794 projects, Grbic completed three builds. Her AI Engineer World’s Fair presentation describes the infrastructure behind that work: role-specific AI training, secure development environments accessible to nonengineers, Claude Code, and an internal MCP server connecting AI tools to company knowledge.
- Engineers as enablers: In a two-hour collaborative exercise, an engineer helped Grbic and other teammates use GitHub, understand version control, and contribute code to a board-game session manager. She argues that engineers can multiply their impact by helping colleagues develop technical fluency.
- Design-system status tracker: Grbic independently designed and built a tool consolidating component information from GitHub, Storybook, and Figma, including searchable records, library status, and live previews. She iterated with fellow designers and deployed internal and curated public-facing versions.
- Working prototypes as the primary artifact: Grbic now develops functional software early, using Figma selectively for visual refinement. The approach lets designers test interface decisions and technical constraints together while retaining ownership through implementation.
- AI-assisted commerce support: With another designer, she built a WooCommerce proof of concept combining mobile chat, WordPress.com authentication, Jetpack connectivity, a site-themed customer widget, and an AI agent that answers questions using merchant-site information and recognizes when it lacks an answer.
Grbic treats cross-functional technical fluency as an organizational capability: designers need protected experimentation time, accessible systems, shared knowledge, and engineering colleagues willing to teach.
