Components level email development skills
Sean Kennedy, senior marketing ops analyst at Zapier, on his email development workflow
The real gain here was turning email production from a craft workflow into a repeatable team process. As Zapier’s email team grew from two or three people to seven or eight, the bottleneck stopped being raw HTML skill and became shared systems, versioning, reusable components, and clear review loops. Parcel let stronger builders encode brand rules once, so less technical teammates could assemble, edit, and ship without hand coding every block.
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At Zapier, email code had lived in shared cloud folders and a giant HTML snippet file. That worked for a tiny team, but broke once multiple people were editing at once. Centralized components and version history mattered more than teaching everyone Git or advanced HTML.
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The practical leveling mechanism was the email design system. A technical owner builds buttons, headers, footers, and layouts once in MJML and Parcel, then teammates reuse those pieces. That cuts emails from thousands of lines to a few hundred or less, which makes building and debugging much easier.
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This is the same pattern seen at other scaled teams. Figma uses Parcel for marketing emails while Litmus stays focused on previewing and testing. Across the market, Parcel is used more like an email IDE and collaboration layer, while Litmus is used more like a testing tool with editing attached.
The next step for this category is making components even more guided, with clearer fields, dropdowns, and safer personalization, so email assembly starts to look less like coding and more like filling in structured building blocks. That pushes more email creation to marketers while keeping brand control and QA centralized with a smaller technical core.