Orchestra
Growens group design system
Year
2021 - 2023
My Role
Product Designer
Tools Used
Figma, Webflow
Case Study
Context
Orchestra is the Growens group design system ecosystem: a family of independent design systems, one per brand, sharing a common vision and guiding principles. Growens is an holding with multiple business units: Beefree and Agile Telecom. Before it included several others like Mailup or Acumbamail.
Problem
Each business unit was moving at its own pace: different tools, different processes, no shared direction. The holding company's goal was to connect them and bring consistency across the group. But the BUs were at very different levels of maturity: some had structured processes, others were effectively working like startups.
The challenge wasn't just design. It was about creating a framework flexible enough to serve four very different brands, while also bringing the less mature teams along without slowing down the more advanced ones.
Process
I led the design of the Orchestra vision and directly built two of the design systems within it: Datatrics and Acumbamail. Each system had to solve a different problem in a different context, so copy-pasting an approach wasn't an option.
The hardest part was people and process, not pixels. Getting startup-paced teams to adopt shared practices required lots of facilitation rather than actual system design. You can build the best component library in the world and it means nothing if the team doesn't use it or understand why it matters.
One honest retrospective: I invested significant time designing a custom Webflow website to communicate Orchestra internally. In hindsight, that effort would have been better spent on adoption: documentation, onboarding, team enablement. The website looked great. The impact on actual usage would have been higher elsewhere.
Outcome
Across the group, the design team grew from 11 to 18 designers, consolidated from 4 design tools down to 1, and expanded from 2 style guides to 7: one per brand and touchpoint. These were team-wide results, not mine alone, but Orchestra was the connective tissue that made them coherent.
