Design system · 2024
A design system three teams would share
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Role
Design Systems Lead
Timeline
2024 – 2025
Team
3 designers, 8 engineers
Skills
Design Systems, Tokens, Governance
Overview
What were we actually being asked to solve?
Two or three sentences of context: who the product serves, what was true before this work started, and the constraint that shaped everything after. Keep a number in here — a volume, a drop-off rate, a deadline — so the stakes are legible before anyone scrolls.
Discovery
What we needed to learn before drawing anything.
Prototyping
Going wide, then testing narrow with real users.
Iteration
What changed between round one and shipping.
Problem
The moment it went wrong for the user.
Frame the problem from the user’s side rather than the business’s. Name the specific moment things broke down — the screen, the field, the hand-off.
Where it broke
Text sits beside the artefact so the reader never has to hold two things in their head at once. Put the screen, the flow, or the before-state here.
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Opportunity
Why this was worth doing now.
For the user
The thing they could not do before.
For the business
The number this moves, and roughly by how much.
For the team
What it unlocks for whoever builds next.
Research
How we learned what we learned.
How many people, over what period, and — worth saying — what you deliberately chose not to ask. Method honesty reads as seniority.
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Research artefact: a journey map, a matrix, or a synthesis board.
A verbatim quote earns more trust than a paraphrase. Keep it short and keep it awkward — the messy ones read as real.
Participant 04, operations lead
Design decisions
The three calls that shaped the work.
How might we hold on to the detail experts need without burying everyone else?
Where we landed
Describe the design in behaviour, not features: what a person can now do that they could not before, and what you gave up to make that true.
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The core flow
Media on the left this time. Alternating sides keeps a long page from feeling like a list.
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The full flow, end to end.
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A detail worth its own frame.
Impact
What changed after it shipped.
68%
First-week activation, up from 31%.
−9 min
Median time to complete the core task.
3 teams
Now building on the same components.
One line at full strength stating the outcome. This is the sentence a hiring manager reads if they read nothing else.
Space for a testimonial from a manager, a PM, or an engineer you worked with. One or two sentences is plenty.
Name, role, company
Reflection
What I would do differently.
Test earlier
The assumption that cost us two weeks.
Think in systems
How it fits the wider product, not just the screen.
Write it down
The decision log that saved the hand-off.