From weeks to hours: How the Powered by Zapier team builds partner demos with v0
Zapier’s embedded platform, Powered by Zapier, lets SaaS and AI companies plug directly into Zapier’s automation engine—giving them access to integrations with nearly 8,000 apps without building or maintaining those connections in-house. The challenge for the Zapier team wasn't the technology; it was showing partners what a great embedded experience would look like inside their own product.
Spinning up a clickable prototype used to require design tools, product screenshots, and heavy involvement from both design and frontend teams. That process could take weeks and net just one or two demos per quarter. Now the team uses v0 to turn partner app screenshots into interactive, high-fidelity mockups of an embedded Zapier experience—complete with UI, sign-in flow, and logic—in under two hours.
Closing the frontend skills gap
Michelle Chu, a backend engineer and technical lead on the team, isn't a frontend developer or designer. That's precisely the point. v0's AI-assisted approach lets her fill that resource gap and ship polished output without relying on specialists. “In two hours using v0, I can now create a fully clickable prototype with 10+ different views. That just wasn’t possible before,” she says. 
The time savings go beyond convenience: they translate directly into more partner conversations. With roughly 12+ hours of design work eliminated per prototype, the team can now craft demos for dozens of partner discussions each month rather than rationing design support for only the highest-priority integrations.
Concrete demos, clearer conversations
The shift isn't just about quantity. Charles Kemp, senior manager of business development, points to the quality leap: “The biggest unlock is quality. We’re showing something better, faster, and more tailored to the partner’s experience.” 
Where partners previously walked through API documentation, they now receive a prototype link paired with: “Here’s what this could look like in your app.” The demos make the value proposition immediately tangible. Partners can click through the flow, share it internally with their own teams, and use it as a blueprint for their engineering work.
Toward programmatic prototype generation
The team is pushing the approach further by exploring v0's Platform API to automate demo creation. The goal is to trigger a mockup based on inbound partner interest, turning design generation into an automated pipeline instead of a manual step.
The long-term ambition: personalized, front-end mockups for all of Zapier's roughly 8,000 integration partners, created and iterated on by anyone on the team—not just those with design or frontend expertise.
