SEBRAE
Ecosystem
App repositioned to personal entrepreneur assistant · 1M active users · 4M service interactions in 2025
Project context
Reformulation of Sebrae's digital ecosystem, which serves more than 3.5 million entrepreneurs, architecting the design system from scratch, leading the Portal redesign from design through launch, and repositioning the app from a generic content hub into a proactive assistant in the MEI's pocket.
Client
Sebrae, Brazil's largest small-business support institution, US$910M annual budget.
Segment
Digital ecosystem of a small-business support institution.
Stage
Established institution, legacy digital ecosystem under reformulation.
Business model
B2B2C. Sebrae funds and operates the ecosystem, the entrepreneur consumes solutions, content and products
Target audience
Millions of entrepreneurs, segmented into 5 business stages (Potential/PF, MEI, ME, EPP, Startups) and 3 entrepreneurial moments (Start, Manage, Grow). The Portal also serves Entrepreneurial Education and Business Environment audiences
Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
Agency VPT (Publicis Groupe, US$28B market cap):
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3 POs
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Design Manager
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Design Ops
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Tech Lead
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Data Scientist
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6 Mid-level Product Designers
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10 Senior Product Designers
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3 QAs
Period
May 2025 to present, project in progress
Design System "Céu"
Challenge
The ecosystem had no common visual language and no contract between design and development. Every delivery renegotiated patterns that should already have been settled, and handoff became a recurring bottleneck. The foundation had grown to 130 colors and 10 typographic sizes, a volume that, if kept, would require 10,000 to 30,000 component tokens at ecosystem scale.
Key actions
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Collaborated on architecting "Céu", the design system for the entire ecosystem, built from scratch: visual patterns, components and documentation governance, raising the aesthetic standard of the system.
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Consolidated the color foundation from 130 to 30 semantic colors, with around 200 contrast-based tokens under the APCA standard, architected to remove the need for 10,000 to 30,000 component tokens at scale, benchmarked against Apple HIG, Tailwind and Material Design.
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Built a spacing system grounded in Gestalt principles, and filtered typography from 10 to 6 sizes using my own web app for typographic system management.
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Built a web app demonstrating color token mapping, giving design and development a shared reference for governance.
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Built a web app benchmarking the best components on the market, interactive and live, to settle interaction design decisions with stakeholders, designers and developers.
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Improved the system documentation standard, grounded in design, development and stakeholder requirements, and created a contribution checklist, making acceptance criteria explicit rather than tacit.
Impact
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The token mapping came out around 300% more efficient than Tailwind and around 50% more efficient than Material Design in number of colors used. The consolidation removed the design-to-development handoff bottlenecks that had made every delivery renegotiate patterns already settled.
Portal
Sebrae presented itself on the web in scattered form: separate addresses per state, subsites such as Empretec, Prêmio Mulher de Negócios and Sebraetec carrying their own visual identity, to the point of looking like sites outside the Portal. On top of that came excess carousels and visual information, with low engagement, and institutional labeling that did not match the language users actually searched with. The inherited research base also showed that entrepreneurs expect to find content from their own region on general pages, without activating location or navigating to their state page.
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Led the Portal redesign across all core features, from design through launch, consolidating the Portal as the main web channel and unifying brand and identity previously scattered across regional addresses.
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Collaborated on restructuring the information architecture across organization, labeling and navigation: a sitemap driven by action verbs ("Guia do MEI", "Para o seu negócio" in Start, Manage and Expand, "Soluções e iniciativas"), poly-hierarchy for content serving more than one audience, institutional labels replaced with user language ("Capacitações" became "Cursos e conteúdos"), state content distributed organically across the whole Portal instead of state pages, and a home structured in identification and solution-presentation blocks, based on the premise of a 10 to 20 second decision.
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Collaborated on the subsite interface design, conceived as a template of content blocks (hero banner, anchor menu and cards, highlights in cards, icons and accordion, filtering, testimonials, video, FAQ) to be supplied by content management, giving per-project flexibility without losing consistency with the Portal.
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3.5M+ entrepreneurs served.
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Portal redesigned across all core features, in production since early 2026, now as Sebrae's unified web channel with a delimited vocation: present the institution, be present in the entrepreneur's daily life, and direct to solutions and channels.
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The subsite template model handed content management back to the Sebrae team without reopening interface decisions on every project.
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The architecture was validated by tree testing with 388 participants across 3 tests, whose 8 learnings were incorporated into the redesign before development.
Mobile app
The app operated as "Sebrae in your hand", a generic content hub duplicating what the Portal delivered better and with wider reach. With no defined audience and no function of its own in the funnel, it was downloaded and discarded: a 63% uninstall rate, 569,762 of 898,687 downloads in the 10-month baseline. A Nielsen heuristic audit failed 21 of 58 criteria, with the worst score on visual and minimalist design. Each solution still arrived with its own logic for talking to the user, and no process guaranteed correct tagging and personalization logic at go-live.
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Collaborated on the strategy for an AI personal assistant permeating every tool in the journey, shifting the app from Attraction to Maintenance in the funnel, on a "Solutions Assistant, Journey Assistant, Business Assistant" maturity path and a segmentation matrix of 5 business stages by 3 entrepreneurial moments.
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Led the design of the high-complexity core modules (Home, Explorar, Chama o Sebrae, Planejadora and in-app tools), including the data-backed decision to retire the "Aprenda" section and absorb it into a redesigned search experience within "Explorar".
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Reviewed, together with the Data Science team, the categories of products, services and content, building the taxonomy that feeds Home, Explorar and Ferramentas.
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Collaborated on authoring a proprietary four-stage communication framework (First Contact, Commitment, Maintenance, Follow-up), adopted as the shipping standard for any solution.
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Collaborated on three growth engines on Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly maturity paths (Personalization with 6 layers, CRM and Gamification, the latter paused as of Q2 2026) and on shipping five use cases under a 360° validation process covering UX, data tagging and personalization logic.
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Took over component library management and created a handoff checklist, restructuring the organization of Figma files to reduce the reading effort for developers and stakeholders.
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Ran stakeholder management on the app track, sustaining the value case for every product decision with Sebrae.
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App in production with continuous increments since 2025, with a defined audience and a function distinct from the Portal.
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The communication framework was reused across 5 production features.
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The five use cases went live validated on all three dimensions, among them a content-recommendation engine reaching 82,878 users, an A/B/n test on the formalization journey with 7,554 visitors, and an annual-declaration reminder viewed 8,734 times.
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900K app downloads repositioned around retention.
