One design system, four product teams
Client
Loop
Year
2023
Role
Design Systems Lead
Tools
The problem
Loop had grown from one product to four in two years, and each team's design and engineering group had evolved its own component library. Shipping a single visual change meant touching four codebases, and nothing looked quite consistent.
The process
Audit before building
I catalogued every button, input, and modal in production across all four products — 34 variants of 'primary button' alone — before proposing a single token set.
Build with engineering, not for it
Paired with one engineer from each team from week one so the component API reflected real constraints, not just Figma layer names.
Migrate incrementally
Shipped the system alongside legacy components, then converted screen by screen, prioritizing the highest-traffic flows first to build trust before asking teams to fully commit.
The result
All four teams were on the shared system within two quarters. New feature UI now ships in days instead of weeks because nobody's rebuilding a dropdown from scratch.
4 → 1
Component libraries
60%
Faster UI implementation
34 → 3
Button variants
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