Orchestra

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 a holding company with multiple business units: Beefree and Agile Telecom. It previously included several others, such as MailUp and Acumbamail.

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 business units were at very different levels of maturity: some had structured processes, while 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 bringing less mature teams along without slowing down the more advanced ones.

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, and team enablement. The website looked great; the impact on actual usage would have been higher elsewhere.

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.