Business Context
BuyerAssist's product had grown without a shared visual language.
By 2022, the product had scaled across a 20-person team without any shared design system — every screen was effectively hand-built, and engineering was rebuilding the same UI patterns from scratch each time a new feature shipped.
The Problem
No two screens agreed with each other.
Inconsistent UI across the product, an inefficient design-to-development handoff, and high overhead on both sides — every new feature meant re-solving a problem the team had already solved somewhere else in the product.
Constraints
—No dedicated design systems team — this ran alongside the Warm Referral strategy work, not instead of it
—Had to build component by component without stalling active feature development
—Adoption had to be earned from engineering, not mandated — a system nobody uses is decoration
My Leadership Role
Nobody asked for this. I identified it as the biggest lever I wasn't pulling.
I initiated the design system myself, alongside my product strategy work on Warm Referral, and owned it end to end — the component library, the documentation platform, and the governance model that kept it alive after the initial build.
Leadership
Self-initiated
End-to-end ownership
Cross-team adoption
Governance model
Execution
Built a comprehensive Figma design system, a documentation platform, and governance guidelines defining how components got added, changed, or deprecated. Tracked component adoption rate, design consistency, and development time as the system rolled out across the team.
Evidence
design system · cover
The system as a whole — the piece that replaced a growing pile of one-off screens.
component library
The full component library — the shared vocabulary engineering and design finally worked from.
cards · usage
One card component, used consistently instead of being rebuilt per screen.
buttons
Every button variant and state, defined once instead of re-decided every sprint.
documentation · usage
Usage guidelines — the part that made this a product, not just a Figma file.
layout · measurement
Spacing and layout rules, so every new screen inherited the same rhythm.
Reflection
A design system only survives if it's treated like a product with its own roadmap and stakeholders — not a one-time Figma cleanup. The governance model mattered more than the components themselves; components rot without a process for keeping them honest.