Design System: Governance, Capacity, and Alignment
Led a 3-month initiative to establish a Design System as the Single Source of Truth. Eliminated a dependency bottleneck for up to 6 feature teams, successfully reclaiming 16 hours of weekly UX capacity for strategic work and enabling near-total development self-sufficiency and platform scaling.
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The UX team was losing 3 days of capacity each week clarifying component usage due to the lack of a Single Source of Truth (SSOT). This forced the team into a manual support role for up to six feature teams across all ceremonies.
The goal was to projectize the creation of the Design System, shifting the UX team from a development bottleneck to a strategic enablement resource, reducing dependency, and accelerating the reliable shipping of user stories.
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UX Lead & Governance Champion (Me): Drove the project, defined component criteria, established documentation standards, and tracked progress.
Partner Designer: Executed the visual design, built components, and updated the visuals in Figma.
Feature Teams (PO, BA, Dev, QA): Key stakeholders whose pain points (inconsistency, heavy story writing, designer reliance) validated the system.
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The Design System immediately became the single source of truth for all UI queries.
Time Reclaimed: Successfully reclaimed 16 hours of strategic design time weekly, reducing clarification time from ~3 days to 1 day.
Dependency Elimination: Achieved near-total elimination of component clarification cycles (from 8-12 down to 0-1 per sprint).
New Focus: UX resources shifted from clarifying simple states to focusing on complex edge cases and high-value strategic problems.
Goal
To projectize the creation of the Design System, shifting the UX team from a development bottleneck to a strategic enablement resource, thereby reducing dependency, and accelerating the reliable shipping of user stories.
Strategy (The 3-Month Plan)
The solution was a phased approach that transitioned the Design System from an internal Figma library to a governing, organizational product blueprint.
Phase 1: Foundational Research and Pain Point Validation
The solution was a 3-month, role-driven process focused on governance before building.
Foundational Research: I interviewed cross-functional stakeholders to validate the problem and structure the solution around their specific needs, ensuring adoption. The critical pain points were captured directly:
Product Owner: "I don't know how to use the components to create reliable user stories or know what's available."
Business Analyst (BA): "Adding component UI rules to the user stories adds significant time to my story writing process."
Developer: "Figma files often have inconsistencies, forcing us to guess responsive behaviors or rely on specific designer availability."
QA: "We have to ask designers to clarify if certain behaviors or states were intended, delaying testing."
Strategic Definition: I created the criteria for a "complete component," establishing the minimum bar a component must meet (description, anatomy, usage, responsiveness, etc.) to be useful to the wider organization.
Project Governance: I set up the project, managed meetings, and championed the initiative across all dependent teams.
Phase 2: Standardized Foundation and Criteria Creation (in Figma)
This phase focused on component structure and fixing technical debt.
Standardized Foundation: The partner designer created the components in Figma based on the criteria I defined.
Remediation Project: I led the audit of all current inconsistencies across the platform. I then built the requirements and lodged the fixing of all foundational inconsistency as a dedicated project to be managed by development, proactively fixing technical debt.
Phase 3: Hand-Off and Operationalizing Governance
This phase transitioned the Design System from a designer's tool to the organization's reference tool.
Transition to Google Sites: I moved the documentation from Figma to a dedicated Google Sites portal.
Single Source of Truth: This site served as the formal hand-off, establishing the Design System as the authoritative reference for everyone. Any UI or component question must first be answered by this documentation.
Maintenance: The site provided version control, easy maintenance, searchable components, and linkable sections for direct reference in JIRA tickets and user stories.
Phase 4: Remediation and Implementation
This is the ongoing phase to ensure compliance and institutionalize the standards.
Inconsistency Audit: I documented and audited all flag component inconsistencies by partnering with teams running current sprints to tag all issues across the platform.
Project Management: I built the requirements and lodged the fixing of all foundational inconsistency as a dedicated project, emphasizing the urgency to project management to fix holistically before technical debt compounded.
Ongoing Alignment: This project became an ongoing initiative to ensure a consistently high-quality experience across the platform.