By Nerman North
As the 2025 international design award season unfolds, a rising talent is capturing attention for bridging cutting-edge tech with human-centered design. Zicheng Gu, an established product designer, has achieved a rare dual honor this year: winning Silver in User Experience (Product UX) at the NY Product Design Awards and another Silver at the London Design Awards. Both accolades celebrate the same project—an AI-driven platform called Proponent – Conversation Intelligence to Sales Success. It’s an achievement that not only marks Gu’s emergence on the global stage but also highlights a product that stands at the intersection of user experience and artificial-intelligence innovation.
A Global Stage Achievement
These prestigious awards attract thousands of submissions worldwide, making Gu’s double win especially noteworthy. The New York Product Design Awards, part of the International Awards Associate competitions, honor excellence in product and experience design across industries. In London, judges were impressed by Gu’s deft use of AI in a UX context, underscoring how her work exemplifies the marriage of technology and design. For a single project to earn recognition on two different continents is a testament to its impact. Proponent addresses a pressing pain point in the business world: the costly disconnect between what sales teams pitch and what customers actually need. By capturing and analyzing sales conversations, the platform creates an “institutional memory” of customer insights and makes them actionable across teams. In practice, this means sales representatives get real-time, AI-powered playbooks and instant answers pulled from a vetted knowledge base, marketing teams gain a centralized hub of validated content, and product managers see data on which features truly matter to customers. The result is unprecedented alignment: every stakeholder stays attuned to actual customer needs, leading organizations to become genuinely customer-centric at scale. It’s a sophisticated solution, but users wouldn’t know it from the interface—and that’s by design. “I translate complex AI capabilities into user-friendly tools that empower sales teams and product-marketing managers,” Gu says of her role in crafting the product. The clean, intuitive experience belies the advanced technology under the hood, reflecting her philosophy that the best tech innovations should feel simple and human.
From Chemistry Labs to Design Studios
To understand how Gu came to lead such an innovative project, it helps to trace the eclectic path of her career. Born in China’s Henan province and raised in Shanghai, Gu’s early interests straddled art and science. She excelled in creative pursuits like drawing and ceramics as a child, even winning art competitions, yet chose a very different field for college: chemical engineering. She earned dual bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Nankai University and Tianjin University. However, amid the formulas and lab work, Gu discovered that her heart lay elsewhere. She found herself gravitating toward design—sneaking into industrial-design classes, sketching product ideas, and devouring design books far outside her official curriculum. By her third year, she was building a portfolio to pivot careers. That gamble paid off: in 2019, Gu was accepted into Northwestern University’s prestigious Engineering Design Innovation graduate program in the United States. There, she immersed herself in user-centered design, collaborating on projects with companies like iRobot, Uber Eats, and Procter & Gamble. “We’d visit users in their homes, test prototypes, and iterate constantly—it showed me how empathetic research and iterative design can solve real problems,” she reflects. This hands-on experience solidified Gu’s passion for UX and proved that her analytical mind and artistic eye could work in harmony.
Armed with a master’s degree and a newfound mission, Gu jumped into the tech industry just as the world was emerging from the pandemic. Her early roles spanned both startup and corporate realms—a deliberate choice that gave her a crash course in the diverse impact of design. At a cybersecurity software company in Texas, she had to evangelize the value of design from day one. The company’s threat-detection product was powerful but convoluted; Gu led a redesign of a painfully long incident-analysis workflow, transforming it into a streamlined process that cut users’ task time by 33 percent. She also helped establish the firm’s first design system, bringing consistency to its interface and improving collaboration between designers and engineers.
From Corporate Giant to Startup Pioneer
In 2021, Gu was recruited by VMware, a global enterprise-software giant, joining a 200-person design organization that served millions of users. There she tackled large-scale design challenges, like overhauling the cloud-services user journey for greater clarity. Gu spearheaded a unified framework for VMware’s cloud platform, simplifying how customers discovered and integrated add-on services. The redesign reduced the onboarding learning curve by an estimated 40 percent, dramatically improving time-to-value for users. She also led design workshops with more than a hundred enterprise clients to gather feedback, an effort that earned a 95 percent satisfaction rate.
When VMware underwent a major acquisition in 2024, Gu took it as an inflection point. It was time to return to a more entrepreneurial environment where she could drive a product vision from the ground up. That opportunity came via a chance meeting with a founder in Seattle. The two bonded over a shared passion for startups and a vision for AI-powered sales enablement. Gu signed on as founding—and eventually lead product designer, and Proponent was born.
Because the startup was fully remote at the time, Gu took the bold step of relocating to London—fulfilling a long-held dream to live in Europe while collaborating across time zones with her U.S. team. Over a brisk six-month development cycle, Gu and her team brought Proponent – Conversation Intelligence to Sales Success from concept to launch. She crafted the experience holistically—from high-level user flows and information architecture to the polished visual design, marketing website, and demo video. The platform entered private beta and quickly earned positive responses from pilot customers, validating that the team was solving a real pain point. Industry observers took note as well: the startup was accepted into competitive tech incubators, and its design began garnering awards.
“From day one, our goal was to align the entire revenue team around the customer’s voice,” Gu explains. “We used AI to amplify human insight, not replace it—that meant designing the interface so that salespeople felt assisted, not overwhelmed, by the technology.” Indeed, balancing powerful AI features with an intuitive UX was the central design challenge. Gu’s solution was to surface AI insights in a contextual, non-intrusive way: a sales rep sees a gentle prompt with a relevant talking point or document precisely when needed, rather than a barrage of data. The interface remains clean and sales-focused, while the heavy lifting happens behind the scenes.
Looking Forward: Technology That Enriches Lives
With two international Silver trophies now on her shelf, Zicheng Gu is reflective and optimistic about what comes next. Wherever she applies her talents, Gu remains guided by a clear design ethos: software experiences should resonate on a human level. In an era when artificial intelligence is poised to redefine how we work and communicate, she believes technology must enrich people’s lives, not complicate them. Her recent successes underscore that belief: by listening intently to users and harnessing AI to meet their needs, she crafted a product experience worthy of global acclaim.
As she charts her next steps, Zicheng Gu exemplifies a new generation of designers equally fluent in design and technology, East and West, art and science. Conversation Intelligence to Sales Success may have put her on the map, but for Gu, it feels like just the beginning. With a foot in multiple worlds and an eye on the future, she stands ready to continue transforming insightful conversations into successful outcomes—one elegant design at a time.