I became a member of the Sympli team in mid-2017. My primary responsibility was to establish the vision and formulate concepts for a new Sympli product. This product was a version control system for Sketch files, known as "Versions".

Team

Product Manager / CTO: Max Ignatyev

Engineering Lead: Kirill Kozionov

Engineering and QA: Olga Vozchikova, Andrey Grebennikov, Alexey Martemyanov, Ilya Kozlov, Alexandra Postovalova, Alyona Didenko

My Role

Once again, I was the sole designer in a predominantly technical team. My responsibilities encompassed everything from designing marketing materials to creating user flows and writing body copy for most interfaces. Our team maintained daily check-ins to ensure everyone was aligned. I worked as closely as possible with the development team, even occasionally working directly with the codebase. We operated in sprints and held regular retrospectives to learn from our missteps.

Additionally, I was tasked with maintaining the existing Sympli ecosystem, which has a Monthly Active User (MAU) count of over 40,000. This includes the web app, plugins for Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Xcode, Android Studio, and later, Adobe XD. I also managed all marketing assets for Sympli products, such as blog illustrations, social media, and videos.

Business Goals and Challenges

Sympli, a growing business, aimed to engage with new users, particularly enterprise design teams, which form the core of our ecosystem. Our goal was to increase revenue and enhance our service for our existing clients by adding new integrations, scaling our tech solutions, and focusing on the needs of large teams. Here are the key objectives we set for Sympli's product line:

• Develop a new product for design version control to broaden our user base substantially;
• Design and establish an ecosystem for the new product, including native apps, plugins, and web service;
• Refine our brand language and marketing communications to make it easier to onboard new users and improve retention;
• Update the design of the existing app (Sympli Handoff), which includes several integrations and platforms;
• Lower the churn rate for Sympli Handoff by improving its user experience;
• As a nimble team, we needed to iterate design quickly. This required me to work directly with our codebase and make changes in the code;
• As the lead designer, I managed a legacy library of design sources, poorly executed assets, and screenshots embedded in vector Sketch files. This slowed down work significantly, so I gradually reconstructed the relevant files from scratch.

Designing the Versions

The launch of the Versions app, from its inception to completion, required an enormous team effort. We began with a basic tech prototype as a proof-of-concept. Following that, we made multiple revisions on Finder daemons to understand the capabilities of the operating system.