Pleo already had the foundation of a design system when I joined the company. But it wasn’t connected with the product organization, which lacked targets for adopting the system and the Design System lacked a wide enough selection of components.
A new team lead had recently taken charge of the design system. I provided support and connected him with leaders of more mature design systems in the industry.
To boost the design system, I initiated a Design System Week, convincing product leadership to allow all designers and half the front-end engineers to focus on it for a week.
The Design System Week aimed for 10 major contributions and achieved 19, but the biggest win was a significant increase in participants’ sense of ownership.
A survey run before and after the Design System Week measured sense of ownership by the participants and the % of people who at least agreed with feeling a sense of ownership went from 50% to 95%!
The success was repeated the year after with the second Design System Week.
