Establishing a design system at a scale-up

Project management
Design lead
Documentation
Userlane logo
Button component and typography in the Burrito Design System
problem
  • The product struggled with design quality: outdated-looking and inconsistent components, and many parts of the product not following the latest design foundations.
  • Developers often reimplemented the same UI elements multiple times, with existing components mostly not fit to be reused.
  • With a design team of 3, and ~4 involved front-end developers, we could not afford to create a dedicated Design System team.
what i achieved
I led a federated team of designers and devs, and together, with careful and purposeful prioritisation, we built a functional Design System in under a year and a half, adapting it as it grew. At the last check, it has replaced 80% of old component and style instances.
Full case study in progress. Read my article on what we have learned:
design system v1: learnings