Procesio: low-code automation, from a blank canvas to a Future Unicorn nomination

Founding designer. The product had to feel simple to people who cannot code and stay powerful enough for people who can. I owned the surface where those two demands collide.

The founding tension. Low-code tools pick a side. Simple enough for business users is too weak for real work. Powerful enough for engineers scares everyone else off. Procesio had to be both, or it was just a worse Zapier.

Where I anchored the product. Everything rode on one surface: the process canvas. Three zones, actions on the left, the flow in the middle, config on the right where a node becomes a real API call. A business user could wire logic together without ever seeing code.

The call testing forced. The first canvas failed on interaction, not looks. Hit areas so small users misclicked and quit, floating panels covering the work, an actions list nobody could scan. I rebuilt the node states and flattened the rail into one searchable, grouped list. Trust in the interaction beats a canvas that only looks clean.

Making a rigid tool inviting. Non-coders read a dense technical UI as “not for me” and leave. A calm blue-gray system, Inter, softened corners, and design tokens made it approachable without dropping any capability.

Result

• Seed-funded (~EUR 1.2M across two rounds, 2020-2021) and the only Romanian scale-up nominated for DIGITALEUROPE’s Future Unicorn Award in 2022.
• 5.0/5 on Product Hunt with two #1 Product of the Day launches (2023 and 2024), plus 4.8/5 on Capterra. A public signal from exactly the technical-but-time-poor users the product was built for.
• Enterprise names on the platform, with Procesio’s partner wall listing Siemens, DHL, LVMH, E.ON, Engie, Iveco, and Schneider among others.
• Shipped from zero as founding product designer, with one PM and one analyst, from first pixel to a live platform (dashboard, process designer, document builder) whose action library grew to 200+ pre-built nodes and 30+ UI components.
• Design system shipped as tokens, so brand and behavior stayed consistent as the surface scaled.

Why this matters to you. In 0-to-1, the founding designer’s real job is to make an inherently complex system feel obvious without making it weaker. On a builder product that judgment either compounds on every feature you add or quietly collapses the whole thing. Here it held.