Adobe
Bringing 1.5 million more people to Adobe Express. From growing Express through activation and PLG to designing new creation tools, enterprise workflows, and rethinking Home and mobile around AI.
Turning Adobe’s reach into active Express users
PLG & Activation
Adobe Express was reaching millions of new people through partnerships and acquisition channels, but access alone didn’t mean activation. The opportunity was turning that reach into people who understood the product, found value, and came back.
I worked across activation, onboarding, and Premium discovery to improve that journey designing and shipping experiments across partnerships, web, and mobile.
Bringing Express Premium to millions across Asia
I designed the post-redemption experience for Airtel and Indosat customers across a partnership expansion that brought 1.5M+ incremental MAU.
Airtel / Indosat: Knowing when to push for more.
Adobe partnered with Airtel in India and Indosat in Indonesia to bring Express Premium to their telecom customers. Research with new Airtel users surfaced a problem: activating Premium didn’t mean people understood they had it or what it unlocked. Over two months, I partnered with PM, engineering, research, data science, and mobile teams to turn those findings into a Premium confirmation experience.
I designed the moments after activation, from a celebratory confirmation to Premium discovery across the main menu and account experience. When engineering initially scoped down the experience, I went back to the research and pushed to preserve the full first-launch moment—including the confetti and Premium discovery—because it was the highest-leverage point in the activation journey.
The partnership expansion brought 1.5M+ incremental MAU to Express. The full Premium confirmation experience increased Premium exploration by up to 44.1% and improved W1 retention by up to 5.6pp.
Premium Discovery
Helping newly activated users understand what Premium unlocks, increasing Premium exploration by up to 44.1%.
Mobile Onboarding
Captured creation intent upfront to personalize how new users entered Express.
Turning search intent into creation
Creation Tools
People often come to Adobe with a specific job in mind, not a product. They search for things like blurring faces, making a passport photo, or turning a flat image into something they can edit.
I worked across design, product, engineering, and research to turn high-intent jobs into new entry points for Express, from taking hackathon concepts toward production to identifying and pitching new acquisition opportunities.
Layerize
I identified and pitched a new AI Quick Action that turns flat images into editable layers a new search-driven entry point with up to 76K projected SEO MAU opportunity.
Layerize: Finding the opportunity before the brief.
I noticed a growing gap in AI creation: generating an image was getting easier, but making that image editable afterward was still hard. I worked with design research to investigate whether that behavior could become a new entry point into Express.
Search analysis surfaced growing demand around “image to layers,” alongside an even larger adjacent need to edit text and objects trapped inside images. That changed how I framed the idea: layers weren’t the user goal, they were the mechanism for making an image editable.
I turned that insight into Layerize, sized the opportunity against existing Quick Actions, and pitched an SEO-first test that could capture people before they ever had an Express project then move them from search to deeper Express creation.
Passport Photo Maker
Designing a mobile-first, search-driven tool for creating compliant passport photos as Express scaled in India.
Blur Faces
Turning an engineering hackathon prototype into a production-ready Quick Action for detecting and obscuring faces.
Bringing approval workflows into Express
Enterprise Collaboration
Enterprise customers already had established approval workflows in tools like Asana, Wrike, and Monday.com. Without integrations, teams had to export work from Express, send it elsewhere for review, then bring it back, breaking the creation workflow.
I designed Third-Party Review & Approval, an extensible workflow that lets partners bring their existing approval systems directly into Express. Authors can submit and revise work without leaving Express, while reviewers continue approving from the tools they already use.
Meeting people where they create across Adobe
Across Adobe
Creation doesn’t always start in Express. It might start with a PDF in Acrobat, a presentation search, or simply knowing what you want to make.
I designed entry points that connect creation across Adobe from bringing AI generation earlier into the presentation journey to building discovery patterns in Acrobat designed to extend into Express.
Generate Presentation
Bringing AI generation earlier into the acquisition funnel, letting people begin creating before sign-in without losing their intent representing a +33K MAU opportunity.
Generate Presentation: Looking beyond the screen I was designing.
People arriving through presentation SEO already knew what they wanted to make, but authentication interrupted that intent before creation could begin. I designed a frictionless entry that lets people start logged out, choose how they want to create, and carry that context through sign-in into AI generation.
While mapping the broader journey, I found another gap outside my scope: SEO landing pages owned by a separate team were sending people into an experience that wasn't set up for Gen Presentation. I surfaced the disconnect and worked across teams to align on a better path, which is now on that team's roadmap.
Acrobat Create
Rethinking creation in Acrobat across a 10M MAU opportunity, with a utility-first system for helping people start and return to creative work.
Get Started Modal Redesign
Redesign and reorganizing 150+ capabilities around how people find and start tasks launching in Acrobat with a framework designed to extend into Express.
Rethinking how creation starts with AI...
As creation becomes more conversational, choosing a template or tool isn't always the most natural place to start. The challenge is helping people move from an idea to the right creative workflow across Home and mobile.
I’m currently designing new ways to start creating with AI across Express Home and mobile a surface reaching roughly 75M monthly active users.
Currently in development, More soon.
Work featured in
Products I’ve worked on, covered by the press.
