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AI product platforms · UI platform · admin experience · accessibility

I build the platform foundations behind complex, AI-enabled products.

I'm Rick Boardman, a senior engineering leader at Zendesk working across AgentX, AdminX, and UI Platform. I lead teams building agent and administrator workflows, design systems, accessibility infrastructure, developer experience, and AI-assisted engineering practices.

I'm especially interested in roles where product craft, platform architecture, developer velocity, governance, and inclusive quality have to come together.

LinkedInPhD research

What I work on

AI-native product platforms

Helping product and engineering teams turn AI-assisted development and agentic product ideas into durable operating practice.

UI platform and developer experience

Building shared foundations, design systems, standards, and tooling that let teams move faster without losing coherence or quality.

Admin experience and governance

Working on enterprise product surfaces where configuration, trust, access, accessibility, and operational confidence all matter.

Accessible product quality

Treating accessibility as an engineering and product quality discipline: tooling, habits, accountability, and inclusive systems.

Selected evidence

Large scope, close to the work.

The common thread is platform leadership: creating the technical and organizational conditions for product teams to move at pace with quality.

Zendesk

Senior Director, Engineering - AgentX, AdminX, UI Platform

Lead 60+ people across 12 scrum teams in 3 countries, spanning AI-enabled agent workflows, administrator experience, UI Platform, design systems, accessibility, developer experience, and product quality.

  • Ran a 100% AI Development initiative across 20+ scrum teams, improving productivity measures while defects and incidents remained flat.
  • Led unified navigation across 8 Zendesk products with distinct technology stacks, improving cross-product coherence while respecting local constraints.
  • Partner across product, design, engineering, legal, compliance, customer-facing teams, and executives to make platform quality part of product execution.

Salesforce

Design System Infrastructure, Accessibility, UX Engineering

Worked hands-on as an engineer on Lightning Design System, managed the Design System Infrastructure engineering team, and built Salesforce's product accessibility organization.

  • Built the product accessibility organization from 3 to 12 people supporting 120+ products.
  • Created scalable enablement systems: standards, tooling, automated testing, dashboards, VPAT workflows, training, and executive accountability.
  • Brought design system, accessibility, and product quality work into regular engineering workflows.

Google and Upstart UX

UX Research, Consulting, Product Strategy

Managed Google UX research teams and later founded an independent UX consultancy advising technology companies and startups.

  • Led research across advertising and client-tool products including AdWords, AdSense, Toolbar, and Chrome.
  • Advised Airbnb, SurveyMonkey, ZestCash, Hearsay Labs, and SlideShare on research strategy, information architecture, and product direction.
  • Built an HCI and UX foundation that still shapes how I think about software people can actually use.

How I work

Technical leadership with a broad lens.

  • Stay close to architecture, developer workflows, platform quality, and AI-assisted engineering.
  • Use standards, tooling, operating rhythms, and feedback loops to make good decisions repeatable.
  • Work through ambiguity with clear writing, structured judgment, and practical collaboration.
  • Apply a multidisciplinary background across engineering, HCI/UX research, accessibility, design systems, and executive operations.

PhD research

Improving tool support for personal information management.

My PhD studied cross-tool personal information management: how people organize, retrieve, and make sense of files, email, and bookmarks when related work is scattered across different tools. It led to a CHI 2004 paper and a prototype called WorkspaceMirror.

Read more about the PhD

Let's talk.

I'm interested in senior engineering roles across AI product platforms, UI platform, developer experience, admin experience, accessibility, and product quality.