Establishing a design system at a scale-up

Project management

Design lead

Documentation

• The product struggled with design quality: outdated-looking and inconsistent components, and many parts of the product not following the latest design guidelines.
• The same UI elements were often implemented multiple times, with existing components mostly not fit to be reused.
• With a design team of 3, and ~4 involved front-end developers, we had no resources for a dedicated Design System team.

• With a scrappy team or 2-3 designers, and 2-3 developers, we built a design system with all the foundations, atoms, and molecules we needed for efficient design and development.
• I established workflows and contribution guidelines, ensuring sustainable progress and driving best practices.
• We built comprehensive documentation, where again I took on the project coordinator role, planning work, creating standards, as well as writing the documentation myself.
• I ensured and monitored adoption – at the last check, 80% of old component and style instances have been replaced.
• I actively designed components and patterns following the atomic design model, as well as assigned component and foundations work to other designers.
• I led a scrappy, federated team of designers and developers, creating design system strategy, coordinating cross-team efforts, and prioritising components.