CDRO — CD Release Orchestration Redesign
Design Manager — full product redesign, leading a team of three designers
product-designuiux-researchdesign-leadership
CDRO's interface was built for pipeline configuration experts, but CloudBees needed to reach a broader engineering audience. At the same moment as the redesign mandate, the Honey UI design system was disbanded — the team lost its design-system foundation just as it faced its largest redesign challenge.
Ran a full double diamond with a team of three designers: discovery through delivery across the core CDRO UI, a new MyWork dashboard, a manual approvals widget, and YAML configuration surfaces. Adopted Material Design/MUI as the new design language, built a theming system on top of it, and prototyped each feature area before engineering handoff.
01 Discover
CDRO had grown into a highly capable but expert-only tool — powerful for pipeline engineers who already understood the system, opaque for anyone else. The redesign mandate started with understanding: who was actually using the product, what they were trying to do, and where the current interface was getting in the way. The early wires phase was diagnostic — mapping the existing information architecture, identifying friction surfaces, and beginning to sketch a new conceptual model for the dashboard and core workflows.
02 Define
The constraint that shaped the project wasn't purely UX — it was the loss of Honey UI. With the design system disbanded, the team needed to adopt a new foundation: Google Material Design implemented through MUI. This wasn't a component swap; it was a decision about product identity. The early CBUI explorations — login surfaces, layout patterns, responsive breakpoints — were the first output of building that new design language from the ground up, establishing the visual grammar that every feature surface would inherit.
03 Develop
With direction established, the team moved into a sustained development phase across four interconnected surfaces. Managing three designers across these streams meant keeping each thread aligned to the same interaction principles while allowing each surface to evolve at its own pace. The microinteractions work captured a layer of detail that rarely makes it into portfolio decks: the small animations, transitions, and state changes that make a complex enterprise UI feel responsive rather than mechanical.
MyWork Dashboard
The MyWork dashboard was the most user-facing feature of the redesign — a consolidated view giving release engineers a single starting point for everything they owned. The 0.2 iteration reflects the team's learning cycle: early dashboard concepts tested against real workflows, with structure and hierarchy adjusted based on how engineers actually moved through their day.
Manual Approvals
Manual approval workflows are a critical control point in release orchestration — any team with compliance requirements or staged rollout processes lives in this UI. The widget design worked through the full interaction arc: requesting approval, notifying approvers, displaying status, and handling the edge cases. Clean enough for engineers encountering it for the first time, precise enough for pipeline engineers running hundreds of approvals a week.
AI Integration — BeeBot
BeeBot was an exploratory prototype: what would AI-assisted release management look like inside CDRO? The exploration ran in parallel with the core redesign work — a signal that CloudBees was thinking about LLM integration seriously, and an early test of how a conversational layer could surface pipeline context without replacing the visual interface.
Responsive Design & Theming
Theming was a core CBUI concern from the start — the platform needed to carry the CloudBees brand identity while sitting on the MUI Material Design foundation. The theming work established the token layer: how Material Design colour roles mapped to CloudBees semantic tokens. The responsive layout work ran alongside it, ensuring the layout system held from full desktop to compact views without breaking the visual hierarchy.
YAML Configuration
YAML is the power-user surface of any CI/CD tool — where engineers define pipeline behaviour directly in configuration. The CDRO YAML surface design tackled how to make configuration editing feel intentional: syntax awareness, inline help, and a layout that kept the editor connected to the visual pipeline view it was modifying.
04 Deliver
The deliver phase was a handoff exercise as much as a design one — working closely with the engineering team to ensure MUI implementation matched the design intent, component by component. The design-to-engineering process first established by Honey UI — specs, annotations, and a shared token language — adapted to the MUI context and carried forward into production across every CDRO surface the team had redesigned.