Role: UX Designer (Senior scope)
Duration: 4 years (March 2022 – March 2024)
Domain: DevOps, Infrastructure-as-Code, Cloud Management
Stack: Figma, Ant Design, design tokens, Mixpanel
Scalr is an enterprise SaaS platform for Terraform/OpenTofu automation — used by DevOps and platform engineering teams to manage infrastructure at scale. Users are technical: they think in pipelines, providers, and workspaces. Not in typical SaaS patterns.
I joined Scalr specifically to build the design system from scratch and own product design end-to-end. The team was small (2–3 designers), which meant full ownership of core product areas and close daily work with engineers and PM.
Activation was defined as a user completing their first run. Mixpanel showed only ~8% of new users reached that point.
The issue wasn't that users didn't want to run — they couldn't figure out how to get there. The setup required crossing multiple disconnected parts of the product: create an environment, set up a workspace, connect a VCS, configure a provider. No unified flow existed. A checklist widget was the only guide, and users dropped off at every step.
Initial onboarding flow
The sharpest drop happened between creating an environment and configuring a provider. These two steps were in entirely separate parts of the interface. Users had to guess where to go next, and most didn't.
Before: three separate screens, no guided path. Users had to navigate across unrelated parts of the product to complete setup.