Adobe Design welcomes Stephanie Mencarelli, VP of Design for Document Cloud

How Mencarelli leads with impact, joy, and connection

Illustration by Sarah Maxwell

With more than 600 million monthly active users, Adobe Document Cloud products (which include Adobe Acrobat, Sign, and Scan, to name just a few) are ubiquitous in the lives and work of a wide-ranging group of people (If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of them!). Behind those products is the Document Cloud design team, whose work includes modernizing the PDF reading experience, integrating groundbreaking new generative AI features, designing effective in-app notifications, and the illustrative assets that people encounter as they take actions and learn new features.

Stephanie joins Adobe Design with a background leading design teams in a variety of industries. She brings with her an excitement to help design drive more impact in the present and to navigate the possibilities of the future. We spoke with Stephanie to learn her perspectives on everything from generative AI and poetry to the superpower and responsibility of designers.

You’ve led design teams at Spotify, InVision, Walmart, and Jasper.ai, what’s at the core of your personal approach to design?

Stephanie Mencarelli: Everything we do should be driven by our values. I have a triangle of values that I like to call my “Bermuda Triangle,” except instead of things disappearing, magic happens! These values are impact, joy, and connection.

Impact is the value we deliver for our customers and, in turn, the value we deliver for the business. Yes, we as designers make beautiful experiences, but at the end of the day, what we do is not art. If we want to paint, we should do that on the weekends.

Throughout my career, I’ve helped teams accomplish the impossible, and the secret ingredient was joy. So I’m constantly thinking, “How do we make this more fun? How do I bring a sense of levity into stressful or pressurized situations? How can I help designers have their best days ever at work?” I think about this Mary Oliver quote often: “What are you going to do with this one precious, beautiful life that you've been given?”

Finally, there's connection. As designers, we're like social anthropologists with better tools. We're fascinated by trying to understand people different from ourselves. One of my superpowers is building bridges across functions. I love diving deep with product, engineering, and marketing partners, to better understand their worlds, as if I'm learning a new language. Except instead of saying, “Where's the bathroom?” in French, I'm asking, “How can we make this experience ‘wow’ our end user?” in engineer-ese.

These three values create a framework that's helped me lead teams to create meaningful work while having a blast doing it. If we're not enjoying the journey while making an impact, what's the point?

What excites you most about joining Adobe Design?

Stephanie: I am beyond excited and grateful to be here. Adobe is regularly cited as one of Fast Company’s Design Companies of the Year, among other accolades for design’s impact. Now seeing this team from the inside, it’s true. This really is the place to be.

It's not just our legacy of excellence, it's how we're actively shaping the future of technology. What particularly resonates with me is Adobe's thoughtful approach to artificial intelligence. In an era where AI development often moves faster than ethical considerations, Adobe has taken a leadership position in responsible innovation. Our work with Adobe Firefly and Acrobat’s AI Assistant exemplify this. We're not just advancing what's technically possible, we're establishing new standards for ethical AI in creative tools. The Content Credentials initiative further demonstrates our commitment to protecting and empowering creators in this new landscape.

What makes Adobe truly special is that we're not just building tools, we're shaping how the next generation of creators will work, while respecting and elevating the creative community. This combination of innovation and responsibility, paired with our unparalleled design expertise, makes this an incredibly exciting time to be part of Adobe Design.

Don’t just take it from me, though, watch all the keynotes and Sneaks from Adobe MAX!

What’s your design leadership philosophy?

Stephanie: My design leadership philosophy is much like a chef's approach to seasoning: just enough. Just as salt enhances flavors without overpowering them, great leadership should elevate teams while letting their individual talents shine. I also believe in the power of dualities, the careful balance of seemingly opposing forces that create something greater than their parts. Through years of leadership experience, I've identified three key dualities that define my approach:

First, I'm passionate yet calm. I’m passionate about making stellar experiences yet feel it’s my responsibility to bring a level of calm and support to my team.

Second, I balance pragmatism and idealism. One of my former engineering leaders called me “the most pragmatic design leader he'd ever worked with.” But here's the magic: I believe we can dream up revolutionary designs while keeping our feet firmly planted in reality—by pushing boundaries within the realm of possibility.

Finally, I'm curious yet decisive. In today's world of constant notifications and rapid-fire decisions, curiosity is perhaps an underrated leadership trait. I'm a firm believer in asking the Five Whys before making any significant decision. However, once I have those insights, I'm quick to make decisions so my team can keep moving fast.

These balanced approaches allow me to lead design teams that not only innovate but also consistently deliver. After all, like a well-seasoned dish, great design leadership requires just the right balance of ingredients.

How are you thinking about the role of AI in your team’s work?

Stephanie: I have this saying that the way in which we’re experiencing technology today is a bit like looking up at the night sky and seeing the stars. You're looking at a change that occurred billions of light years in the past, but you're just seeing it now. And that's what we're experiencing with technology today. Because we are in the midst of this tectonic shift in how we want to interact with technology, while knowing what technology can achieve, I think that those of us working on Document Cloud, and Acrobat in particular, have a huge opportunity design new paradigms for how millions of individuals create, consume and share documents.

We have 635 million active users—that's a huge amount of the world’s population, many of whom aren't yet using emerging technology. Acrobat might be the first environment in which they've actually tried out an AI assistant. We're at the forefront of designing and developing these patterns that millions of people will use, but we don't have all the answers yet.

So we’re in a total discovery mode: A/B testing, learning and failing fast so that we actually meet the needs of our users. Instead of just bolting on AI features and applying them for the sake of it, we must deeply understand what our customers need and how we can help them achieve it.

It's important for us to use AI to reduce the amount of boring, repetitive tasks that knowledge workers, small business owners, students, and others are facing, so that they can get back to doing the things that they love: like being more creative or spending more time on strategic thinking. Taking the “suck” out of their day-to-day with AI is what we hope to achieve.

From a personal perspective, what key skills will designers need to build or hone over the coming years?

Stephanie: Curiosity. To be curious enough to try new AI experiences, to be adaptable, and to continuously be learning. Designers will also need curiosity to understand how the things they make not only resonate with the users they serve, but how they benefit the business. You don’t need an MBA to be a designer, but you do need to understand how the work you do supports the company you work for.

Design’s superpower has always been and will continue to be in making. Telling compelling stories through visuals, I believe, will never go out of style. Our designs don't merely solve problems. They inspire awe, evoke emotion, and shape the future. We are alchemists, transmuting the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This relentless pursuit of the profound, this tireless quest to make the world a more beautiful, more intuitive, and more enriching place, is the essence of design. It’s a superpower fueled by curiosity and elevated through mastery. And it’s the key to shaping the future, one inspiring story at a time.

What’s next for the Document Cloud design team?

Stephanie: Even before my time, the Document Cloud design team was innovating, their work for Acrobat Liquid Mode was recognized as one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023. And that legacy of visionary experiences continues, just this month, Acrobat's AI Assistant was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2024.

So what can you expect to see from this team moving forward? A relentless focus on developing mind-bending experiences that truly meet the diverse needs of our 600 million-plus user base. We're not just optimizing existing workflows, we're reimagining knowledge worker productivity with AI-first approaches that empower end users like never before.

And our commitment to user-centered design extends beyond the individual: We're also nailing stakeholder collaboration through features like intelligent link sharing and best-in-class review capabilities. In an increasingly distributed world, we're making it easier than ever for teams, students, and small business owners to ideate, refine, and align.

The way I see it, the Document Cloud design team isn’t just building features, we're shaping the future of documents. With Adobe's legacy of innovation and our relentless focus on user needs, I'm confident we'll continue to deliver the kind of experiences that cement our status as an industry leader.