When I joined the team, we had seven different button components spread across four codebases. Every engineer had made sensible local decisions that had compounded into a fragmented product. This is the story of fixing that.
The Problem
Scaling a product team creates design drift. More engineers, more repositories, more decisions made without a shared reference — and you end up with inconsistency that slows both design and development.
The Approach
We started with a token audit — pulling every colour, spacing value, and font size out of the existing codebases and finding the common patterns. That became the foundation of the token layer.
From there we worked component-by-component, always in Figma first, then code. Every component shipped with documentation, accessibility notes, and usage examples.
Results
- Reduced component count from 47 unique button variants to 6
- Saved an estimated 3–4 days per major feature in design/engineering handoff
- Adopted by 40+ engineers across the organisation within 6 months
A design system is not a project — it’s a product. It needs product thinking, roadmapping, and ongoing investment to be useful.