Lexion
2023 - 2024
Lexion is a fast-growing series B startup venture-backed startup founded at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Their core product is an AI-powered contract management and operations workflow platform that helps teams get deals done faster. Lexion was acquired by Docusign on May 6, 2024
Size: I was employee 86.
Synopsis
Role: Staff Product Designer
Team size: 1-2
My remit at Lexion was to build out their design function, enhance usability, and elevate the design maturity of the team. I was a design team of one, which made me the head and tail of design.
Product Impact
Launched Lexion’s word plugin as a standalone product
Shipped multiple flagship features
Automations home page and templates
Lexion’s word plugin and standalone initiative
Custom doc types
Custom clauses in Lexion’s admin experience
Team & Operations Impact
Established a design system and design language
Kicked off a design and engineering handoff process
Designed a hiring pipeline and scorecard rating system
Coached designers on the team
Set the vision for v0 projects and led discovery research
AI-search
Global navigation
Building a strong design culture
Lexion operated like a small tiger team. Every team member was a specialist that’s super skilled in their domains, and adjacent domains. This meant that a lot of engineers had design chops and perspectives on what good UX looks like. This foundation allowed me to not have to pitch the value of design, but instead curate how we surface scalable design patterns and solutions. Building a culture of great design, also meant building strong relationships with PM and Engineering, and being at the forefront of decisions during or before the data architecture phase of most features.
Automations templates
Lexion automations existed, but were fairly undiscoverable. During this initiative, we asked ourselves how could we make Automations a first class citizen at Lexion, and have it act as a true value prop of why Lexion is fast and easy to use, especially for new users. We began by surfacing a landing page and tab in the global navigation instead of having it be buried under multiple sub-menus. We also curated a library of commonly used automations, so an end user has less content to populate when building a workflow for the first time.
Scaling design documentation
During this project, Figma also decided to paywall Dev Mode, which forced engineers to purchase their own licenses in order to get specs. This is sort of the coup de grâce for most small design teams, especially because Figma licenses aren’t cheap. We had to figure out clever solutions to hand off design documentation to engineering and translate design intent to implementation.
AI Contract Assist
In 2024, AI agents gained popularity, especially in the legal space. Lexion used this market interest to launch our own AI agent called AI Contract Assist (AICA), which also had a free standalone version to attract new users. AICA allowed users to set guidelines for contract terms and evaluate contracts against these guidelines by suggesting edits and adding comments while explaining its recommendations.
