From concept to patent-pending in one sprint

Avalara operates a sprawling integration ecosystem—connecting businesses to over 1,400 systems for automated tax compliance—but when Chief Strategy and Product Officer Jayme Fishman looked at how his own company built software, he saw a process bottlenecked by handoffs. Slides, specifications, and rounds of interpretation stood between an idea and anything tangible. That changed when the team adopted Vercel’s v0, a tool that turns plain-language descriptions into working prototypes.

Within roughly two months, Avalara shipped two new patent-pending products. More importantly, the company’s entire approach to product development shifted from documenting concepts to iterating on live interfaces.

Seeing the problem before solving it

One of Avalara’s hardest challenges was supporting customers who integrate with hundreds of different backend systems. The company could hand over technical documentation, but once a customer left Avalara’s platform to work inside their own ERP or compliance tool, the team lost visibility—and with it, the ability to assist. Fishman envisioned a Chrome extension that would sit alongside the user’s workflow, guide them through each step of an integration specific to their own systems, and remain available to answer follow-up questions.

He described the idea to a teammate one evening. By the next morning, the teammate had built a working v0 prototype and posted a video demo in Slack. “I showed it to my exec team, and all the light bulbs lit up,” Fishman said. That prototype became the foundation for a patent application, a production implementation, and public announcements—all within approximately 60 days. “You realize you don’t need to talk people into an idea if they can see it.”

Replacing async handoffs with live iteration

Avalara’s previous product workflow mirrored that of many SaaS organizations: product managers drafted PRDs, designers translated requirements into Figma files, and engineers recreated the result in code. Fishman described the gap between intent and outcome: “Everyone gets tagged in late and we lose momentum.”

With v0, product leads start directly in the tool, describing their goal and receiving a working interface within minutes. “It’s like you can will it into existence,” Fishman said. For designers, the shift is similarly transformative—ideas can be shown immediately, turning what used to be an asynchronous task into a live conversation for immediate feedback.

Prototypes over concepts

Across Avalara, v0 prototypes have replaced abstract concepts. Fishman calls the tool “a cultural accelerant,” noting that design and validation cycles have shortened considerably. The company is now pursuing product development built on iteration rather than interpretation, delivering two patent-pending products in about 60 days as evidence of the new cadence.