Enterprise Design System
Turned a PDF corporate style guide into a developer-ready design system used by five product teams, cutting front-end time by 30–35%.
The problem
The organization's Corporate Style Guide lived in a PDF. Five product teams each translated it by hand into their own Figma files and CSS, so components drifted apart and the same button existed in 11 variants.
What needed to be done
Turn the style guide into a development-ready design system without moving the brand source of truth, and get five product teams to adopt it.
How the right problem was found
I audited the components across all five products and interviewed designers and engineers in each team to see where and why they diverged. The brand rules were the same everywhere; what differed was how each team had implemented them, which told me the drift was a translation problem, not a brand problem. So I built a development-facing derivative in three layers: design tokens, accessibility-tested components (each with a Figma entry, coded implementation and a note on when not to use it) and patterns. Rollout used named champions in each team, a lightweight RFC process, codemods for breaking changes and adoption dashboards.
The outcome, measured
Teams built faster, with fewer variants and accessible components by default. Three years later the same teams still maintain the system.
- -30–35%
- Front-end development time
- 11 → 3
- Button variants
- 100%
- Shipped components at WCAG 2.1 AA
- 40+
- Contributions in year one