Building a UX function inside a pre-IPO DevOps enterprise

Context

CloudBees is a pre-IPO DevOps enterprise platform — CI, release orchestration, feature management, analytics — used across large engineering organisations. When I joined, those capabilities lived in products that had grown independently, each with its own navigation conventions, design language, and UX assumptions. The result was a platform that felt like four products sharing a login. Customers were carrying the cognitive load that the product should have absorbed.

The work wasn't to redesign individual screens. It was to make the platform coherent — and to build the design function that could sustain that coherence as the company scaled toward its next chapter.

Role & team

What I led

Three threads ran in parallel across those six years:

• •Research and platform strategy. I grounded the redesign in field evidence — structured interviews across sales, customer success, and customers — then built the ResearchOps infrastructure to keep every subsequent study running on the same rails. The output shaped navigation architecture, onboarding simplification, and the platform narrative that unified the work.
• •Product redesign at scale. As design manager, I led a team of three through the full CDRO double diamond — discovery through delivery across the core UI, a MyWork dashboard, a manual approvals widget, and YAML surfaces. Customers called the result a quantum leap; adoption was rolled out through a version-switching mechanism that let teams migrate on their own timeline.
• •Design infrastructure. Two design systems, four iterations of navigation architecture, and the org build from three designers to nine. The infrastructure thread was what made the product thread possible.

Outcome

• •Organisation: grew design from 3 → 9 designers, established hiring priorities and management rhythm, and moved UX upstream through navigation, ResearchOps, and platform-thinking programmes.
• •Product: delivered the CDRO redesign in roughly six months through a full double diamond — customers called it a quantum leap; adoption was managed through a version-switching strategy that let teams migrate on their own timeline.
• •Systems: advanced Honey UI through token architecture, dynamic theming, and cross-product adoption.
• •Research: installed ResearchOps infrastructure — Double Diamond in Jira and Confluence, Dovetail with a coordinated taxonomy — that expanded from design into the broader product organisation.
• •AI: shipped the first AI Chatbot Dashboard prototype (BeeBot) at the 2022/23 hackathon; explored agentic onboarding IA as the next evolution of platform-led setup.