Summary
Frustrated by inconsistency and mounting design debt in team backlogs, early in my career I had championed for having an enterprise-wide design system to assist teams in reducing their growing disruptions. With the approval of the strategic plans for the new centralized platform Converge, I was able to finally get departmental and executive buy-in to establish the first official design system, Momentum. Though its deployment didn’t go smoothly, due in large part to a significant delay on my part that missed the launch window, Momentum would eventually become the pet project of all of QDivision. At the time of my departure from UniGroup in May 2021, we estimated that Momentum had reduced design debt by 84%, saved 5800+ development hours, & provided $1 million in ROI.
Competitive
Analysis
Process
Management
Change Management
Vision
Articulation
Design Systems
Project Management
Roadmapping
Product ROI
over 5 years
Converted
products
Design Debt
reduction
Development
hours saved
Problem
From the beginning of my career in design I’ve been a big proponent of accessibility, speed, and consistency. I believe through these aspects you can achieve incredible digital experience in record time by allowing more focus to be spent on solving problems rather than color theory or corner radiuses, which is explains why I’ve always been obsessed with design systems. It was also a source of much of my frustration early in my career as the idea of creating such a system was often brushed aside by development or product as a “eh, maybe if we find some free time between epics someday.” All the while production products were wildly off from the design mocks I had deeply researched & delivered.
All of this lead to mountains of design debt in the team backlogs that were rarely brought forward due to the need to deliver new features every sprint rather than polishing what already had already been made. Undeterred, I began to maintain my own personal design system as being one of only a pair of UX designers for a dozen product teams, speed and consistency was paramount for my deliverables. Through the years this problem of design debt and consistency would perculate up until a sprint or two was spent on it, but never a full solution. However, with the formation of QDivision and the creation of the UX team, the lack of a design system was exponentially noticeable.
Solution
As myself and the other 3 team leads began our strategic planning of what would become the platform system Converge, it quickly became evident that without an organization-wide design system the seamlessness of the platform would be incredibly difficult to maintain. Over lunch one day with my 3 other team leads, I presented my plan for how if we took the time to just set the foundations of a design system in place, it could reduce our build time on Converge by at minimum 20%. Finally agreeing with the need of such a system, they suggested we wait until after we got approval for Converge so as not to overwhelm leadership with major project requests.
The week following Converge’s approval by QDivisions’ executive leadership, we gathered the VP of Product & the VP of Development to present our strategy for Momentum. Understanding the need for such a system was quickly apparent to them but want drew their attention was the amount of potentional build time saving, especially with Converge looming. Thus after a couple of weeks of existing development framework evaluations, we were given approval to find volunteers to help build the system during their “expertiment hours”. So our solutions architect & myself presented to all of UniGroup IT what Momentum was & how it would improve their day to day. Many were excited about the idea & couldn’t wait to help.
Outcome
With the rest of my team at or over capacity, I scrambled for the 2 weeks spending every moment of the day working on Momentum in order to reach the deadline I had accidentally set. I knew this was the one opportunity to establish just have resourceful a design system could be to the teams. Unfortunately, the deadline came then went and the engineers became pretty relentless about the release failure. Fortunately, a week and a half after the deadline, I released Momentum 1.0 to QDivision by going team to team to collaborate over its initial aspects. Surprisingly, the reception was full of gratitude for the scale and detail of the system, and additionally apologetic as they’d didn’t realize the scope of what the initial release would be.
Shortly after the release, the collection of volunteers grew and progress to not only get Momentum to production for all teams but also a push to swiftly clear design debt from the backlogs began. The teams set up a committee to govern how changes would be done to the system, the policing of consistency, and roadmaps for implantation. I spent much of this time with our Solutions Architect and our Product Lead at a strategic level just ensuring if the teams needed guidance or advice on directions to head toward, we were there.
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