Design System Advocacy

Building consistency and efficiency through unified design principles

VISUAL DESIGN, UI DESIGN, INTERACTION DESIGN

Background

Amongst layoffs and acquisitions, I found myself the sole product designer at a software company with over 300 employees, reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer. It became apparent to me that I was going to need all the help I could get in order to maintain a unified experience across our suite of products, and I was in a position to communicate that directly to one of the main stakeholders on a weekly basis during our 1-on-1's.


The goal

With so many products being worked on in parallel, we needed to establish a framework that the developers and future designers could lean on during times where I was not available to give my input.

Pitching the idea

On paper, there are tons of benefits to implementing a design system, so naturally, our CPO was on board when I brought it up during our 1-on-1. It's one thing to get support from your manager, but there are a lot more stakeholders involved when it comes to allocating resources, so I was asked to prepare a deck to pitch the idea to the other executives and managers. Some of those stakeholders included the VP of Engineering, Software Engineering Manager, Director of Product Management and the Product Marketing Manager.

My goal was to emphasize the longterm efficiency gains without downplaying the time investment that it would require. We were a company that liked to move fast, so I knew that efficiency was going to be a key factor in its adoption.

Below are some excerpts from that presentation

Product designer and manager

I had received the green light to begin planning the implementation of the design system, it all came down to players involved. I was allotted one front-end developer for 8 hours a week, and the content designer on my team would help with the documentation.

This was new territory for me - I was now a product manager as well as product designer. If this design system was going to succeed, it was going to be up to me and my small team.

Dark mode & design tokens

Our dark mode was not meeting accessibility standards, so I took it upon myself to propose a new colour theme, taking advantage of Figma design tokens. After meeting with the Product Marketing Manager and discussing the impact of changing our product colour theme, we agreed that the updates to the colour theme would be implemented in the new design system.

Note: I lost my premium Figma access before I was able to take a proper screenshot

Reality setting in

As I began identifying and designing key components, it became apparent that we were in over our heads. As much as I wanted this initiative to succeed, and I fully believed in its benefits to the company, I was stretching myself too thin. I was the product designer for four different squads, and I had just added another project onto my plate. There were days where I had free time to work on it, but at the rate we were going, it felt like we weren't making any progress.

As the excitement of the "shiny new project" faded, the design system became an item in our backlog, for chipping away at when we had some downtime.

2024 layoffs

My company went through a downsizing exercise and myself, along with my product design team, were all laid off before the completion of our design system in June.

Conclusions

I may have been overly-ambitious to tackle such a large-scale project , but we were headed in the right direction and I don't regret starting it, in fact, I'm incredibly proud that I got it off the ground. I was not asked to create a design system, I saw a need and sought out to fill that need, even if it wasn't something I had done before. It instilled greater confidence in my ability to achieve things I set my mind to.