ZINNIA - ACCESS MANAGEMENT

At Zinnia, operations users were working inside a permissions system that nobody fully understood. Roles were misconfigured, access conflicts slowed down workflows, and 22% of role-related support tickets were the direct result of permission errors. I led a team to redesign the platform from the ground up — moving from a technical permission model to a role-based system where every role maps directly to tasks a real person performs on the job. The architecture was driven by one key insight: people don't think in permissions. They think in jobs. We validated the direction through 3 rounds of usability testing with 9 participants across US and India-based teams — refining the experience until both IAM administrators and Ops Managers could navigate confidently.