Sam Zoloth

Lead Product Strategist at Amdocs Studios

I’ve spent about twelve years at the fuzzy front end of products, where nobody agrees yet on what to build. For the past two years I’ve led product strategy for DreamWorks Animation, on the platform its artists use to find, manage and reuse their work.

On nights and weekends I build my own apps. It’s how I learn what designing with AI can really do.

Off the clock I ski, throw pottery and cook. I’m teaching myself piano, so reach out if you have any tips.

What I’ve learned

Adoption runs on habit.Finding an asset went from 15–30 minutes to seconds, and 81% of 1,000+ artists opted in without a mandate.

DreamWorks Animation · 2024 to now

I ran 35 interviews across eight-plus departments and found the barrier was habit, not missing features. We built for that. In the AI pilot, video search takes under a second, down from more than ten.
Read the case study

AI earns trust one narrow job at a time.HP’s AI Companion shipped on its new AI PCs, from a design I made in 3 weeks.

HP · 2024

There were no requirements and no user research to start from. I narrowed a broad assistant brief to one use case we could trust and drew its privacy lines. HP asked for me by name for the next phase.

The first request is rarely the real product.A request for a digital textbook library became the case for an AI classroom platform.

Cengage · 2023

In a 12-week discovery with its Gale division, I found some teachers were paying for lesson plans out of their own pockets. Interviews showed which tasks they would hand to AI and which they would keep.

The CEO’s idea gets tested too.His homepage idea lost my first A/B test by 13%. Free-trial conversion went up 63%.

Wasabi Technologies · 2017 to 2021