Designing Clarity: navigation built for users, not features.

As Brevo grew through new features and acquisitions, its navigation turned into a fragmented list of experiences. Together with our Content and User Lifecycle Managers, I led a redesign that brought coherence back, shifting focus from what we offer to what users want to achieve.

Company: Brevo an all-in-one CRM combining campaigns, sales, loyalty, automation, conversations, and data management.
Product stage: Mature SaaS platform
Timeline: 2025
Role: Unified UX & Design System Manager
Stakeholders: Content Manager, User Lifecycle Product Director, CPO, UX Director, Engineering Managers, PMs, and Designers.

Problem

User and business pain points

Brevo’s navigation had become a scattered collection of tools and acquisitions with no cohesive information architecture. It reflected our internal organization rather than user workflows, creating friction and confusion. The absence of a CRM-aligned structure fragmented the experience and diluted Brevo’s all-in-one promise.

  • Users struggled to find tools or even know where to start.

  • Onboarding drop-offs were frequent, with many never returning to key features.

  • Navigation failed to support user roles or tasks, reducing efficiency and confidence.

  • Limited discoverability of Brevo’s full capabilities.

  • Inconsistent and unscalable navigation as new modules and acquisitions were added.

Research insights

User research and analytics confirmed the need for a more intuitive, role-based structure:

  • Card sorting and interviews showed users organized actions by role and intent, not by product area.

  • Cross-role analysis highlighted the need for global management spaces for settings and resources.

  • Usage analytics revealed long, inefficient paths and early churn caused by a lack of structure.

  • Homepage feedback underscored the demand for customizable, role-specific dashboards.

Framing the challenge

Rather than treating this as a UI redesign, we positioned the initiative as a strategic realignment of Brevo’s information architecture, connecting Product, Content, and Engineering around a shared goal:
make Brevo’s navigation reflect how users think and work, not how we are structured internally.

Principles

  • User-centric : organize by user roles and goals, not internal teams.

  • Scalable : design a structure that can grow with new features and AI modules.

  • Sustainable : establish governance to ensure alignment beyond one-off redesigns.

  • Pragmatic : plan a realistic, phased rollout to manage legacy constraints.

Solution

Building a scalable model

The new Role + Action model was designed as a cohesive navigation framework built on a single, consistent mental model, shaped collaboratively across Product, Content, Engineering, and UX.

Each “action zone” was defined by user intent, not internal ownership:

  • Work : where users act: campaigns, automations, conversations, commerce.

  • Monitor : where they measure: dashboards, reports, analytics.

  • Organize : where they manage assets: templates, images, brand defaults.

  • Set up : where they configure apps, data, and administration.

  • Datahub : where they manage their data model and integrations.
    Ideally part of Settings, but surfaced as a strategic, high-visibility feature.

This framework became the backbone of Brevo’s navigation, enabling future expansion and AI-driven modules without redesign.

A shared IA framework now serves as the single source of truth for categories, terminology, and hierarchy across all product squads.

Design System evolution

The Naos Design System evolved to support the new IA with minimal disruption:

  • Refined the existing lateral navigation for greater flexibility.

  • Introduced a secondary navigation for Settings based on the existing Tree component.

  • Handled operational changes smoothly, with no breaking impact for designers in Figma.

These evolutions validated the robustness of our existing components and prepared the system for future scalability.

Trade-offs and rollout

While the long-term vision was shared and adopted across teams, we focused on pragmatic delivery, managing risk while maintaining business continuity:

  • Deferred migration of the Analytics and Resource Center areas, which were still under active development.

  • Some lower-impact modules were temporarily kept as-is to prioritize effort where it mattered most.

  • Conducted a progressive rollout to 1 % → 10 % → 50 % → 100 % of users, validating adoption, collecting feedback, and adjusting as needed.

Impact

The new navigation was deployed in September 2025, and while still in the learning phase, early indicators show good results and alignment across teams:

User experience outcomes

  • Task efficiency: early trends show faster access to key areas and improved task completion times.

  • Stability: no major regressions or friction reported post-deployment.

  • Cross-product discoverability: stronger discoverability, reinforcing Brevo’s all-in-one CRM positioning.

Organizational outcomes

  • Internal alignments: smoother communication between Product, Design, and Content teams, supported by a shared taxonomy.

  • The Role + Action framework is now the standard reference for all new modules and initiatives.

  • A defined governance to manage and monitor information evolutions.

My role as a leader

My contribution spanned strategy, coordination, and delivery:

  • Vision and framing: defined the initiative’s scope and narrative, positioning it as a strategic redesign of Brevo’s IA rather than a UI refresh.

  • Cross-team orchestration: aligned Product, Content, Engineering, and Research around shared priorities.

  • Design leadership: guided designers on IA principles and Figma implementation, ensuring autonomy across squads.

  • Governance setup: co-created long-term ownership and review cadence with the User Lifecycle team.

  • Executive alignment: connected IA evolution to product strategy and growth objectives.

  • Mentoship: coached designers to think systemically and link design decisions to scalability and long-term impact.

This initiative was not only a design transformation but also an organizational one — establishing shared ownership, clearer communication, and the foundation for a scalable, role-based experience at Brevo.

Learning -> Redefining navigation is an ongoing transformation that requires continuous alignment.