Enterprise Software
One system for forty product teams
How an enterprise software company brought forty product teams onto one shared design system, and now ships new features twice as fast.
- Industry
- Enterprise Software
- Service
- Design system
- Scope
- Forty product teams across six products
The challenge
Six products, forty teams and forty ways to draw a button.
The company had grown through acquisition and now sold six products as one platform. Customers noticed the seams at once: different menus, different tables, different words for the same thing. Each team rebuilt common parts from scratch, and every redesign took a quarter.
An earlier attempt at a design system had stalled at a set of design files that engineers never adopted. Leadership wanted a system that teams would choose to use, not one they were told to.
- Fourteen different button styles and nine date pickers in production
- No shared code, only shared design files that drifted
- Customers describing the platform as six products in a trench coat
Our approach
Build the system with the teams, in code, from the parts they already used most.
Start with an honest inventory
We captured every interface component in production across the six products and grouped them by purpose. The audit showed that thirty components covered nearly all real use. Those thirty became the first release.
Tokens, components and plain guidance
Colour, type, spacing and motion live in design tokens shared by design files and code. Each component ships with accessible defaults, usage notes in everyday words and examples taken from the products themselves. Dark and light themes come from the same source.
Adoption as a product
We embedded designers with the first four teams, fixed what slowed them down and published every change with clear release notes. A small core team now runs the system like a product, with a roadmap and a weekly open session for questions.
The outcome
One platform that looks and behaves like one platform.
Within a year all forty teams were building from the shared library. Time from design to release for a typical feature halved, accessibility issues fell sharply, and customers stopped mentioning inconsistency in feedback. Designers now spend their time on problems rather than on redrawing buttons.
Our teams stopped arguing about buttons and started arguing about customers again.
The system now covers more than ninety components and is the default starting point for every new product the company acquires or builds.