Coveo
Grew Coveo’s design capacity 380% in 12 months, building a centralized practice with distributed ownership across a fast-growing, engineering-led company.
Achievements
- Increased design capacity 380% in 12 months
- Built a centralized design practice with distributed ownership, pairing designers with product managers
- Shipped Plasma, a token-based design system connecting Figma directly to Coveo’s Relevance Platform
Saying Yes Is as Essential as Saying No
Design at Coveo had a mandate problem before it had a headcount problem. Requests came in reactively, and designers ended up as unicorns: research, requirements, wireframes, UI, illustration, QA and front-end work, all on whatever landed on their desk that week.
I mapped every mandate against every designer, then rebuilt the structure around it: a centralized practice with distributed ownership, designers paired 1:1 with product managers, a shared backlog running on two-week sprints, and a team diversified with a UX researcher, an art director, a UI designer and a content designer.
Saying yes to the right work meant learning to say no to the rest.
The Shift
Four designers with uneven, overlapping mandates and a long list of underserved work in the margins became a practice with real structure: two design managers, mandates mapped and colour-coded by focus area, and a standing bench of champions and consultants behind it.
→
Mandates mapped ad hoc, by whoever had room
→Mandates mapped by design, with room to grow
Plasma, a Shared Design Language
Plasma is Coveo’s open-source design system, the backbone of a leaner, more consistent product surface. It runs on tokens: designers update an icon, a colour, a spacing value directly in Figma, and the change flows through automatically. No coding required, and no wasted engineering time on trivial updates.
One source of truth, from a Figma layer to a line in production.
Plasma: the homepage, a component’s implementation docs, and the icon library
The Icon Journey
One icon shows the whole pipeline: drawn once in the Plasma Figma library, published into the Plasma design system, then live inside Coveo’s Relevance Platform, ready to use without a single line of code.
Product Transformations
The shift showed up in the shipped product too, not just the org chart: three surfaces, each rebuilt from the ground up.
Plasma replacing Vapor: same job, a much clearer home for it
The admin console, rebuilt as Coveo Relevance Cloud
The 101 learning platform, relaunched as Coveo Level Up
#onevoice team ❤️
Culture Works Faster Than Processes
The mapped mandates and the shared backlog gave the practice its shape, but the culture, saying yes to the right work and no to the rest, is what made 380% growth hold.