Killing the Bottleneck: Establishing the Design Single Source of Truth
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 24 hours (~3 days) of capacity each week on component clarification cycles due to the lack of a Single Source of Truth. This forced involvement in backlog refinements and ceremonies for up to 6 feature teams.
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UX Lead & Governance Champion. My focus was on spearheading the projectization, defining comprehensive component criteria, and establishing documentation standards. A partner designer handled the visual execution and Figma component updates.
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A 3-month, role-driven process:
Defined the Complete Component Criteria in Figma to standardize anatomy, usage, and responsiveness.
Transitioned all documentation to a Google Sites portal for governance, version control, and access (the Single Source of Truth hand-off).
Initiated ongoing platform remediation to holistically fix accumulated UI inconsistencies and technical debt.
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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.
The Cost of Dependency
The UX team was functioning as an organizational bottleneck, costing the business significant time and capacity. The lack of a definitive design source of truth meant the team was constantly pulled away from high-value feature work to perform manual component clarification.
Capacity Drain: The UX team was losing the equivalent of 24 hours (~3 days) of strategic capacity each week simply clarifying component usage, design rules, and required behaviors.
Mandated Involvement: Dependency was so high that the UX team needed to be present at all backlog refinements and ceremonies to answer UI-related questions for a maximum of 6 distinct development teams.
Capacity Misallocation: This heavy reliance prevented the UX team from focusing on strategic initiatives, complex edge cases, and core user needs outside of immediate development support.
My Role Focus
My role as the UX Lead was to lead and spearhead the implementation, focusing on project governance and setting the system's structure, not component execution.
Leadership & Governance: I set up the project, managed meetings, tracked progress, collected feedback, and championed the initiative across teams.
Strategic Definition: I created the comprehensive criteria for a "complete component" and established the documentation standards.
Partner Designer Role: The partner designer was responsible for the visual execution, building the components, and updating the visuals and animations in Figma.
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
I interviewed different cross-functional team members to validate the core problem and structure the solution around their specific needs:
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."
Phase 2: Standardized Foundation and Criteria Creation (in Figma)
This phase established the minimum bar for what a component must contain to be useful to the wider organization.
Defined a design foundation (color, typography, responsiveness, spacing, etc.).
Created a component audit list and established the "Complete Component Criteria." This criteria mandated that every component must include a description, anatomy, parts, usage, animation rules, responsiveness, dos and don'ts, and variants.
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.
Impact: A New Operational Model
The Design System immediately established itself as the single source of truth for all UI queries, enabling feature focus and self-service.
Weekly Time Reclaimed: Successfully reduced component clarification time from ~3 days (24 hours) to 1 day (8 hours) per week, reclaiming 16 hours of strategic design time weekly.
Dependency Elimination: Clarification cycles dropped from 8-12 questions per sprint to 0-1 per sprint, achieving near-total elimination of the dependency bottleneck.
Team Autonomy: Development teams achieved significant self-sufficiency immediately after the design walkthrough. Support was only needed during the first subsequent sprint, meaning development runs faster and more independently.
New Focus: UX resources successfully shifted from solving questions about simple states, responsiveness, and attributes to focusing on complex business logic and edge cases.