Design System - Multi-Tenant Component Platform

The company had grown through acquisitions, so the UI language was a patchwork of leftover frameworks and one-off fixes, and the design system existed mostly as aging Sketch libraries no one fully trusted. The real problem was structural. Most design systems serve one product and one brand. This system had to serve many internal products, hundreds of financial institution brands, and external partners building on the same components, so the actual deliverable was a guarantee that whatever shipped on top stayed consistent, accessible, and on brand regardless of who built it.

Role

As UX Design Lead, my responsibilities were to:

Lead the migration from fragmented Sketch libraries to a single Figma native source of truth

Run a cross-product audit of real shipped screens to define core primitives from actual usage instead of a designed-in-isolation ideal

Rebuild primitives with auto layout, tokens, and responsive behavior, and fix the default theme to meet contrast requirements

Redefine alerting and messaging as a flagship pattern, unifying banners, toasts, inline errors, and modals under one severity model

Build a lightweight governance process for new component requests, reviewed jointly by design and engineering

Bake accessibility into every component brief, including keyboard behavior, focus states, and ARIA guidance

Create a Figma annotations kit so designers could specify roles, states, and interaction details for developer handoff

Redesign the documentation site with clearer structure and practical usage examples to drive adoption

Run workshops, demos, and 1:1 onboarding sessions to move teams off custom components and onto the shared system

The core decision

The core decision underlying the system: lock interaction and accessibility into the component, let appearance flex entirely through tokens, and keep structure composable. Brand lives in CSS variables, never in a component fork, so one canonical component can serve hundreds of institution brands without multiplying code or re-litigating accessibility per team.

Results

60% increase in component adoption in the first six months after the Figma migration, 10+ cross-functional teams actively using and shaping the system, WCAG 2.2 AA behavior built into every new component by default.