Evolt

The context

Evolt is a platform of collaborative design thinking tools used to improve a product, a process, or an entire company. Several apps under one roof — UX maps, brainstorming canvases, surveys, personas, customer journey maps, storyboards, moodboards, empathy maps — all real-time multi-user, all browser-based.

Used by Royal Canin, SNCF, and Crédit Agricole for in-house workshops and persona work, sometimes with custom tooling built for their specific use cases.

My role

Tech lead for four years on a team of 4–5 developers. Owned the architecture, conceived and built several of the tools myself, set the design system, and managed delivery alongside the founders.

What I built

• Suite of collaborative design thinking tools

  UX map, persona, brainstorming, customer journey map, storyboard, moodboard, empathy map. I conceived and built several of these myself end-to-end — the UX map and conceptualization tools in particular.

• Real-time multi-user collaboration

  Multiple participants editing the same canvas at the same time, with changes propagated through GraphQL subscriptions. Same reason as on every project I touch with variable data shapes — GraphQL + flexible models let new tool types ship without breaking the existing ones.

• Shared design system

  A Figma library and a shared React component library, both refreshed monthly to absorb new patterns, new technology, and the lessons of the previous month. The cost was real upfront, but every new tool after that landed faster and stayed visually coherent across the suite.

• Enterprise customizations for Royal Canin, SNCF, Crédit Agricole

  On top of the standard product, custom tooling for specific client use cases — without forking the codebase or fragmenting the team.

• CI/CD and test culture

  Pipelines on GitLab, automated tests with Jest, deployments via Docker. Boring infrastructure done well so the team could move fast without breaking things.

• Led 4–5 developers across four years

  Weekly 1:1s, weekly team sync, code reviews on every PR, and a habit of writing things down. Same playbook I've kept since.

Tech stack

• GraphQL

  API + real-time subscriptions for collaboration.

• Node.js

  All backend services.

• React

  All frontend apps, sharing a common component library.

• TypeScript

  End-to-end.

• Jest

  Unit and integration tests.

• GitLab

  Source, CI/CD pipelines.

• Docker

  Service containerization.

Trusted by

• Royal Canin
• SNCF
• Crédit Agricole

The trade-off

Building a suite of collaborative tools with a small team means visual and code consistency could rot fast. I invested early in a Figma + React design system, refreshed every month — slow at the start, fast forever after.