Express Extensibility
With Express competing with Canva, we needed extensible approaches to bring 3rd party apps to Express through “add-ons” and we also needed to make Express embeddable in other company’s products including our own. The embed SDK brought Express functionality to Acrobat, ChatGPT, Slack, Hubspot, etc. accounting for 114% Express growth.
Problem
How to enable 3rd party technology in Express and integrate Express into other products.
Solution
Design an add-on platform and launch an Express SDK to embed in 1st and 3rd party apps.
2X
Doubling Express users through strategic platform integrations
What I Brought
-
I led the design strategy for Adobe Express extensibility, ensuring that third-party add-ons and SDK integrations expanded the platform’s creative potential while maintaining a seamless and intuitive user experience. By prioritizing contextual discoverability and frictionless adoption, I helped drive 415% MAU growth through add-ons.
-
I partnered with engineering, product, and business teams to define and deliver an embeddable Express SDK, enabling integrations across Acrobat, Slack, HubSpot, and more accounting for 8M new users. This initiative not only scaled Express’s reach but also drove 3M new users in a Express-Acrobat integrations.
-
By designing an engaging marketplace for third-party add-ons and fostering a developer-friendly plugin ecosystem, I enabled a tenfold increase in third-party plugins within a year. This effort positioned Express as a powerful, extensible platform that seamlessly integrates into diverse creative workflows.
Editing an image
in Acrobat
This video shows the Edit Image SDK in action inside Acrobat allowing a user to easily remove background, apply effects, make adjustments before saving the image back to the presentation.
Gen AI to generate images in Acrobat
Using the Generate Image SDK, an Acrobat user can use the power of AI to create images for documents. In this video you see how we can use a contextual menu to open the SDK and write a prompt to generate image more suitable images for this presentation.
415%
growth in MAU using add-ons
from design of intuitive, contextual add-on discovery and creation of engaging add-on marketplace
8M
users of through integrations
with 114% growth of Express MAU coming from Acrobat integration and 3rd party integrations of Express.
“Lance was my product org's Design leader for Extensibility. Lance was especially instrumental in building bridges with the Acrobat team by showing rather than telling how we might embed Adobe Express.”
Aubrey Cattell — VP, Adobe Extensibility
Outcomes
114% growth surge — more than doubling Express users in under a year through strategic platform integrations
Headed Express-Acrobat integration design efforts, adding 3M new users in less than a year.
Drove 10X increase in third-party plugins within a year and fostered innovation for Express users by delivering Express plugin platform design.
