Luminary Design System

Bringing Consistency & Efficiency to Life

Overview

Project
Luminary Design System

Role
Product Owner / Federated Team Leader

Year
2022 – 2025

Development Efficiency: updating functionality and layouts across 3-5 development teams for every enhancement, ADA update and bug done on an individual basis and could take months to complete.
Design Efficiency: reduce time to create designs for projects and reduce discrepancies with dev handoff.
Brand & Experience Consistency: experiences across web were inconsistent making interactions for customers unpredictable. Styles and designs across multiple touchpoints bringing consistency like print, digital ads, web and mobile experiences.

Accomplishments

Web Component Library: Shared web component library of 350+ components. Built with developers from different areas in mind with agnostic builds and detailed documentation.
Figma Component Libraries: for web and email designs. Enabling teams to repurpose designs and layouts quickly. Created tokens out of base styles to consistency of new component needs.
Federated Team: built a team of 12 federated members across design, experience architecture and development teams. Put into practice shared workflows and agile methods for integrated collaboration between all team members.

A single source of truth adoptable
and accessible by all employees to create unified, harmonious, and consistent artifacts.

Initialize the system

Evangelize. Get leadership onboard with the benefits of building the documentation and component libraries for the teams.
Choose a team structure. Strategize and plan out the best path for the business with the right combination of people to build and maintain the system.
Define a roadmap for immediate, upcoming and future work for the design system team.
Define and create workflows and agile processes for the design system team to outline the necessary work and what should remain elsewhere in the business.
Setup the platform and structures needed prior to the first builds.

Initiate component builds

Align structures to bring alignment between design and development teams on structure breakdown and naming conventions for shared language.
Define and build initial elements to support current business initiatives. Includes standard smaller components but also layout structures to support CMS content layouts for those building pages who are not designers nor developers.
Define Solving issues as a team, first holistic system example, spacing consistency identified so tokens were created and updated across the entire design and development system of components.
Evaluation with each new major project for web and email experiences that use the system. This gets builds in quicker and reduces re-work if components were created or updated later.

400+

components built

12

federated team members

6

platform integrations

Optimizing the design system

Transitioning to a dedicated team, while still managed in a federated model, members from each team become dedicated to working on the design system and component library as their primary work.
Bug maintenance began to gain focus as usage became more widespread and bugs were present in new, critical business initiatives.
Workflow updates to integrate closely with project teams to ensure minimal impact to project customer production delivery.

Future focus

With the over 400 components built for critical projects, the design system team was at a stage to stabilize and calibrate goals towards wider spread usage. As more teams begin using the library components and brand guidelines gained clarity a shift of focus for the team was beginning to take place.

Documentation clarity and information at decisions and usage were becoming paramount. As more teams began to use the system it was critical to maintain the core purpose of the builds and ensure knowledge was shared amongst the teams in the timing that they needed it.
Optimization and simplification of initial, rushed component builds with complex usability.

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