A design library built while shipping
There was no design system to start from, and no room to stop and build one. The My Account library grew out of live product work over four years, until it was a stable team capability ready to absorb the company's central system.
- Hybrid
- Lead Product Designer → Senior Design Manager
- May 2022 – Aug 2026
- One designer to six
My role
Hybrid, leaning manager · Lead Product Designer → Product Design Manager → Senior Design Manager, Kaizen Gaming. I set the foundations and architectural direction. The team built and maintained the library through their own product work. Some designers took ownership of specific areas and helped formalize patterns and documentation.
Designing on screenshots
When I joined, My Account had no systematic design practice. Figma files were working files: designers took screenshots of the live product and drew changes on top. There was no shared library, no file architecture, no versioning and no record of reusable decisions. Work was organized around the next request.
- Before: screenshots of the live product, drawn over
- After: named components, their sizes and states
Every project had two jobs
Rebuilding the product upfront was not realistic, and the technical architecture was not ready for a full design-system approach either. Instead of a standalone project, every piece of product work, in payments, profile or KYC, became a chance to audit what existed, compare similar solutions and decide what should become reusable.
The guiding question: what are we solving now, and what should become a pattern for everything that comes after?
Some patterns propagated immediately. Others were documented and held until the right redesign or engineering opportunity. For roughly the first year and a half, the team collected, challenged and standardized decisions before they became a formal library.
1 → 6
Three principles behind the architecture
- Structure first, brand separate
- Mobile-first, documented
- A system, not a library of pictures
Structure first, brand separate. Components were designed around their states, variants, meaningful sizes, breakpoint behavior and where content could change, and kept apart from brand expression. Brand decisions would eventually arrive from the center of the organization.
Mobile-first, documented. Deliverables started documenting mobile, tablet, desktop and native behavior. Engineering no longer had to infer responsive behavior from a static desktop design.
A system, not a library of pictures. Over time, the team moved from designing screens to thinking in systems: patterns, components, states, variants, responsive behavior and implementation.
When the central system arrived
The company's central design system came later. One of its first requirements was light and dark theming. My Account had not been closely involved at first, but we followed its evolution and aligned local decisions with its foundations. Because structure had been kept apart from brand, the library could adopt the central tokens without redesigning the product. The remaining work was auditing how colors were implemented in production and aligning them.
The alignment was documented as short records, each with context, decision, rationale and implications. The team worked on them together.
What changed
By the time I left, the My Account library had reached a stable V1: reusable components, responsive behaviors, foundational decisions and the patterns gathered over years of product work, maintained by the team rather than by one person. When the central system and its theming reached My Account, the team did not start from zero.
- V1
- 4
Reflection
This was never a one-off design-system project. It evolved over about four years alongside a live, complex product, while the team kept shipping. We didn't just standardize the UI. We changed the way the team designed and maintained the product.