A design system as an operating agreement, not a component library
WM’s internal tools span corporate career portals, dispatcher command centers, and tablet apps used by drivers who are mid-route. Holding all of that together with one designer meant building a system that made the right decisions the obvious and easy ones.
Architect, owner, and maintainer
6+ product teams, 40+ engineers
4 years, continuous
Web, tablet, mobile
Increase in developer efficiency, measured against pre-system delivery baselines.
Designers covering the suite, with no drop in coverage or quality.
Contrast and interaction baselines built into components rather than reviewed after the fact.
Different users with different devices versus one company’s worth of drift.
A dispatcher on a 27-inch monitor and a driver on a tablet in a truck cab are not the same user, and internal software is exactly where that always gets ignored. Every product team had solved buttons, tables, and empty states on its own at various points in time. Users moving between tools paid for it in relearning; engineers paid for it in rebuild time. Designers looked at everything and cringed.
After restructuring and some team departures by early 2022, I was the only product designer on the whole internal suite. Personally reviewing every screen was not a realistic plan so much as a slow-motion problem. I had faith in my skills, but the system had to become the thing that scaled, not me.
Componentize the arguments, not just the UI.
Most internal design systems die as documentation projects; gorgeous libraries with extensive documentation that nobody properly adopts. So I treated this as a governance problem first. The system’s real job was to take decisions off the table so that a team could ship a data-dense table, just without reinventing density, sort behavior, and focus states from scratch every time.
That meant being explicit about what the system had opinions on and where teams stayed free, and publishing that boundary rather than letting people guess. Foundations and interaction behavior: locked. Layout and domain-specific composition: yours (but ask me if you’re unsure).
Foundations before components.
Type scale, spacing, color and states resolved first, with accessibility baselines built in rather than audited later and patched in a panic.
Patterns for the genuinely hard cases.
Data-heavy apps call for data-dense tables, bulk selection, live-updating rows, empty and error states, etc. These are the components internal tools actually live or die on.
Situational testing.
Components validated right away in real product contexts instead of on a swatch page, which is what earned engineers’ trust and got them reused.
Adoption is a service, not an announcement.
I ran “office hours”, a contribution path for teams who needed something the library didn’t have yet, and Figma-to-code parity checks with engineering leads so that a component meant the same thing in both places. This was one of the biggest gaps in prior work. Contributions came back into the system instead of quietly forking away from it.
I also mentored the designers who came through the org on system thinking, and how to extend a pattern instead of drawing a brand new one. We all needed a refresher on how to make a design argument in engineering’s terms. That turned out to be the part that let the system survive team changes.
A system nobody contributes to is a system that dies the first time somebody needs something it doesn’t have.
21% faster delivery, and a suite that finally reads as one product.
Standardized components and situational testing produced a measured 21% increase in developer efficiency across consuming teams when we compared deliveries before and after the system took effect. Just as satisfying: the suite started to feel like one company’s software, so a dispatcher moving from Resource Center to Gantt no longer felt they were seeing software from two different decades.
The system is the reason a single designer could manage an internal product portfolio this wide, and the reason the ML dispatch work shipped on the timeline it did. Leverage over decoration!