Design system set up and implementation
I led a team to build a unified design system that became the design language across engineering. I empowered my lead UX engineer to own the technology and implementation while I ensured everything worked together holistically, drove adoption across all engineering teams, and managed execution using Jira to track progress and keep us on schedule. The result: inconsistent products unified under one language, and both design and engineering moved faster.
The problem
Products across the company looked completely different from each other. Design decisions weren't consistent, engineers had to reinvent components for every product, and design-to-dev handoffs were slow and error-prone. It was inefficient.
The approach
Audit & alignment
Every product looked different — no unified design language, no design system in Figma, no shared pattern library. We started by taking inventory of what components and patterns we actually needed.
Design & define
We designed all identified components in Figma with full variants, then empowered our lead UX engineer to choose the right technology stack — selecting tools that would capture the Figma designs into code that engineers could easily use, with clean versioning and easy adoption built in.
Build & execute
We broke the work into Jira stories under a single epic and worked in sprints. My role was protecting the team's time — ensuring they had space to build while managing their other priorities so nothing fell through the cracks.
Launch & drive adoption
We promoted the system to engineers and ran trainings. Where teams defaulted to Tailwind, we showed them where the system would actually save time. Success was measured through visual consistency checks, code reviews, and the most telling sign — engineers asking us to build more components.
The outcome
All 5 products unified under one language. 8 teams now use the design system as their standard. Designers and engineers moved 20x faster on component implementation—from 5 minutes to 15 seconds. And finally, everyone was building with the same visual language.