Spotlight: meet Giang Tran, our first design intern

Giang Tran is Rootly AI’s first-ever intern. Giang is a 3rd-year student studying Interaction Design and Business at the University of Waterloo, where she was recently awarded as the Waterloo Co-Op Student of the Year. From day one, she stepped into a high-ownership environment: shipping high-impact work with minimal oversight, shaping both product and brand during a pivotal phase of Rootly’s growth.

Building Design as a Strategic Function

From the beginning, Giang’s role was less about helping out and more about building foundations.

She worked across the entire product surface, leading the design of major features and introducing a stream of “Goodness Items” - small but high-impact improvements that collectively raised the baseline quality of the product. They were thoughtful refinements that made workflows clearer, interactions smoother, and the product more trustworthy for the engineers who rely on it.

Beyond the product itself, she leaned into AI-powered workflows to scale Rootly’s visual output. Using tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT, she designed systems that 10x’d marketing and brand asset production, transforming what had been a manual pipeline into something any team member could plug into. 

And then there was the billboard: a full-scale Rootly ad in New York’s Times Square, designed by Giang. A big milestone for a student’s very-first co-op term.

Sitting at the Intersection of Product and Brand

At Rootly, Giang carved out a role that lives directly in-between product design and brand & marketing.

On the product side, she works closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and Developers — jumping into calls, interrogating problem spaces, tightening end-to-end user flows, and surfacing edge cases. She approaches design with systems thinking, always considering how a decision will scale across different users, teams, and use cases.

On the brand side, Rootly became a kind of creative lab for her. She partnered with the Creative Director to help define Rootly’s first brand guidelines, acting as a thought partner to both product and design leadership. She crafted some of Rootly’s earliest blog visuals, designed collateral for key industry events like KubeCon, LeadDev, and AWS re:Invent, and shaped the visual identity of Rootly AI Labs, all while iterating quickly and fearlessly.

The throughline in all of this is speed with intention: she ships fast, but with a clear eye for craft, coherence, and long-term foundations.

Designing with AI at the Center

Giang cares deeply about the intersection of AI and consumer technology. As a designer, student, and heavy AI user, she brings a high bar for product and visual design, especially in AI-driven experiences.

Her toolbox includes Figma, Midjourney, v0/Vercel, Mobbin, Pinterest, Cosmos, Twitter, and more. Recently, she’s been leaning into AI-heavy prototyping with Cursor, helping blur the lines between PM, Engineering, and Design and bringing those disciplines closer together in the product development process.

A Closer Look at Two Impactful Projects

On-Call Schedule Redesign Project

One of Giang’s most impactful product projects was a full redesign of the on-call schedules page, a core part of how engineers understand incident coverage across their teams.

The challenge was non-trivial: the page needed to support hundreds of schedules, multiple user types (SREs, managers, admins), dense multi–time zone rotations, and upcoming “schedule in schedule” functionality, all without overwhelming users.

As the sole product designer on this 2-month initiative, Giang owned the process end to end:

• Conducted user interviews and analyzed support tickets to understand the pain points.
• Synthesized those findings into a clear problem definition and design principles.
• Explored and refined interaction models and visual structures in Figma.
• Worked closely with a team of 7+ engineers during implementation to ensure the details held up.
• Defined how to handle tricky scenarios like PTO conflicts, overrides, and nested schedules.

The resulting experience is more intuitive and scalable, making it easier for teams to see who’s on, who’s next, and where gaps might be all at a glance. 

Scaling Brand Through AI

On the brand side, Giang used tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT to transform how Rootly produces visual assets.

Through thoughtful prompt engineering and systematizing the design workflow, she:

• Turned what used to be a fully manual, designer-dependent process into a scalable asset pipeline.
• Enabled any team member to plug into the system and generate on-brand visuals for different touchpoints.
• Helped the 3-person marketing team save roughly 50% of their weekly workload on manual asset creation.
• Freed up marketing to focus more on strategy, storytelling, and planning.

In many ways, she moved from designer to design systems builder and brand director — while still being an intern.

Looking Ahead

Throughout her time at Rootly, Giang has grown into an even more resourceful, fast-moving, and collaborative designer, especially in the context of a small, high-trust team. She thrives where expectations are high, feedback is candid, and impact is tangible. From the team’s perspective, she’s a self-motivated designer with both vision and execution, someone who treats every challenge as a chance to experiment and learn, and a teammate who is humble, thoughtful, and genuinely fun to work with.

For anyone considering an internship at Rootly, Giang’s experience is a glimpse of what’s possible: interns are treated as true product contributors, trusted with real ownership, and given visibility into decisions that shape the product and company. She’s deeply grateful not just for the projects she’s worked on, but for the trust, mentorship, and support she’s received along the way—from the entire Rootly team, who made this growth possible.

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