Building a scalable Design System

As our products and teams grew, our existing component library was no longer enough. Components existed, but we needed a shared system around them: common principles, clearer ownership, contribution processes and a way to scale across teams.

We used a future-backwards workshop to bring together stakeholders from marketing, product and engineering. Together, we reflected on where we were, aligned on where we wanted the system to take us, and surfaced the opportunities and risks along the way.

As Product Design Lead, my role was to turn that shared ambition into a strategy the organisation could realistically adopt and maintain.

Create a single source of truth for design across the company—one that could improve consistency and quality while making it easier for teams to design and ship at scale..

I led the initiative with our five-person design team, working closely with three core front-end contributors and two product managers.

Because we didn't have a dedicated design-system team, cross-functional participation was essential. I worked with department leads to bring in contributors and advocates from product, engineering and marketing, creating shared ownership rather than positioning the system as a design-only initiative.

Rather than attempting a company-wide overhaul at once, I structured the rollout into three phases over 12 months: build the foundations, expand through real product use cases, then establish the processes needed to maintain and evolve the system.

We evolved the library from foundational styles into a more comprehensive system spanning typography, colour, icons, inputs, buttons and complex responsive patterns such as navigation, cards and modals.

But the components themselves were only one part of the challenge. The harder problem was creating a system for how they would be designed, contributed, documented and maintained across multiple teams.

We didn't have the resources for a dedicated design-system team. So rather than treating that as a blocker, I designed an operating model that distributed ownership across our existing product teams.

The principle was simple: the design system should evolve through product work, not compete with it.

I secured leadership support to incorporate design-system work directly into feature sprints.

If a team was building a new AI tutor, for example, the components required for that experience would be designed and contributed to the system as part of the same sprint.

Because our five designers were embedded across different product teams, I introduced bi-weekly design-system workshops where we could bring upcoming component needs together.

We challenged assumptions, compared use cases and designed components to work across teams and platforms—not just for the feature that originally triggered them.

For highly specialised components, the designer closest to that product retained decision-making ownership.

I established a contribution and onboarding process so designers, developers and product managers knew how to use the system, how to contribute to it and where decisions were documented.

A dedicated Jira board connected design-system work to individual product-team boards, while shared documentation and communication channels made changes visible across teams.

This helped move the design system from a standalone initiative into part of how the organisation built products.

Adoption couldn't be mandated by design—it had to be built with the people using the system. I created regular feedback loops across design, engineering and product so issues could surface early and teams could influence how the system evolved.

These loops helped us treat the design system as a living product rather than a finished library.

The hardest part wasn't designing components, it was creating organisational commitment around them.

I initially pitched the initiative to leadership around three outcomes: stronger brand consistency, a more coherent customer experience, and faster product development. Importantly, I paired the proposal with success metrics so we could evaluate whether the investment was actually working.

Once leadership was on board, the next challenge was turning support into participation. Together with the design team, I ran ideation workshops with developers, product managers and marketing, and worked with department leaders to establish advocates from each area.

I then created a regular cadence with those representatives and partnered closely with a product designer who helped manage the initiative day-to-day.

That distributed model became critical: the design system succeeded because ownership extended beyond the design team.