Design a first-run experience on the Cohere platform that helps developers evaluate Embed and Rerank on their own data.

Introduction

Most enterprise deals at Cohere start with a developer. Before a bank or retailer signs a private deployment contract, an engineer usually signs up for a trial API key, tests Embed and Rerank against their own documents, and reports back whether search quality improved. If that first week goes badly, the deal often never reaches procurement.

The prompt asks us to design a first-run experience on the Cohere platform that helps a developer evaluate Embed and Rerank for a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or search use case. Embed turns text and images into vectors for semantic search; Rerank re-orders a list of candidate results by relevance to a query. Together they are the "R" in RAG, and they are often adopted on their own, even by teams that use another provider's generation model. I'll clarify the scope, explain why it matters, segment developers, find the biggest blockers, and design and measure a solution.

Step 1

Clarify Questions (3 minutes)

• Are we designing for self-serve developers, enterprise evaluators, or both?

• Why it matters: A hobbyist wants a quick demo; an enterprise engineer needs proof on their own data.
• Hypothetical answer: Engineers at mid-to-large companies evaluating Cohere for a production search or RAG system.
• Impact: We'll optimise for evaluation on real data, not tutorials.

• Where does the experience live: dashboard, docs, SDK, or all three?

• Why it matters: Developers move between the browser and their code editor.
• Hypothetical answer: The Cohere dashboard plus SDK and docs.
• Impact: The design must connect the dashboard with code the developer can paste and run.

• What is the business goal?

• Why it matters: It sets our North Star.
• Hypothetical answer: More trial accounts that reach a "quality proven" moment and request a sales conversation or upgrade to a production key.
• Impact: We'll measure evaluation completion and conversion, not sign-ups alone.

Propose the Goal

Help an enterprise developer prove, within one working day, that Embed and Rerank improve search quality on their own data, so more trials turn into production usage and private deployment conversations.

Define the Scope

In scope: sign-up to first measured result, a guided evaluation on the developer's sample data, and a shareable result. Out of scope: billing redesign, the generation (Command) playground, and on-premises installs.