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Camunda - from Niche to Heavyweight
My Role
Head of Product Design
September 2021 - present
Opportunity
When I started working with Camunda as the head of design in 2021, Camunda was a niche player. While the product was very powerful, it lacked functionality that made it impossible to compete against the bigger players (UIPath, Pegasystems, IBM, Microsoft, etc).
While users love the product, big companies are reluctant to implement B2B software that isn’t considered an “enterprise” heavyweight product. Being profiled by Forrester or Gartner reports would add legitimacy that would turn Camunda into an enterprise-grade solution.
The goal was simple: Add product functionality that will help the company compete with larger corporations and gain marketshare, and get products profiled by analysts.
Solution
Drive adding functionality in a buildable, sustainable way through building a strong product design culture:
- Define what needs to be built by talking with users, understanding their needs, their intentions and prove it through usability testing
- Create an end-to-end user experience that included various elements (getting started experience, feature discovery, documentation, API documentation, etc) to contribute to overall product success
- Integrate a design system to ensure that products can be quickly prototyped, coded, and needing low amounts of maintenance
- Create a collaborative environment to empower design team members to actively engage with product management and engineering
- Focus on outcomes, not just features through qualitative user feedback and quantitative usage data
Quickly add functionality to compete with bigger market leaders:
- Camunda Marketplace, with 150+ connectors available
- Agentic AI builder
- Copilot AI, with in-app suggestions to improve the user’s ability to create
- RPA (robotic process automation) integration
- IDP - large scale document processing with machine learning capabilities
Outcome
- Prior to 2023 - Camunda was considered a “niche” player, not included in Forrester or Gartner categories.
- 2023 - Forrester identified Camunda as highest in the “vision” category.
- 2024 - Gartner includes Camunda in Business Orchestration and Automation Technology category
- 2025 - (soon to be released in Q4 2025 - stay tuned!)
- Revenue doubled over the course of 4 years, and Camunda is on track to become an industry leader, according to preliminary analyst results
Other items worth mentioning
- Tooling upgrade: Integrated a 3rd party system to enable teams. Teams built functionality 40% faster, with less bugs, while also making the product accessible.
- Taught the designers to become TECHNICAL. Technical products require technical designers. The designers learned how to work within teams, not as an assistant, but as a truly integrated partner that helped to identify opportunities, test them in the market, and create truly innovative solutions.
- Integrated user research into the overall process to ensure that everyone understands the users, their needs, and how usable the products are.
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