Stepped up to lead cross-functional efforts to develop a design system

• Bouyed by my talk on (improving) Communication Between Designers and Engineers at WWDC 2017, I joined the cross-functional PLS team that comprised 1 designer and 1 web engineer at the time
• Goals:
  • Complete web endpoint that Design and Engineering could use as a starter documentation for cross-functional teams
  • Complete Design team-managed Google Doc for PLS documentation, along with supporting documentation for one-off components
  • Convert spritesheet to SVGs that could be turned into our new Wealthfont web font style
  • Create Sketch library for Design team

Results

• Endpoint: great for engineers, but limited adoption as it always required logging into your Wealthfront.com account; hidden behind the main site rather than an internal resource, which we actually had a engineering-centric version that was much more accessible

  https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/d64b5f36-d369-4f22-9298-f855e0c9fac4/PatternLibrarySystemWealthfront.pdf

• PLS Google Doc: completed and updated to v4, which involved a lot of meaningful audits and cutting out of extraneous colors, type/spacing sizes and component variants

• Spritesheet conversion: completed ~90%; project was abandoned due to the departure of the original 2 members of the PLS cross-functional team

• Sketch library: completed ~60%; project in limbo as it was observed that the team only used ~20% of the library components, and most of their workflows continued with creating variations of separate assets they had used in their previous projects

  

v2

• After the departure of the original PLS team, I became the de facto leader

• Rallied a new cross-functional working group to determine direction of PLS

  • Instituted bi-monthly "PLS Office Hours" to encourage cross-functional project teams to present components at any stage of development for feedback and visibility for cross-pollination with other projects

  • Collaborated to create a Guidelines doc and Vision presentation to align the company on the new team's efforts:

    [WiP] PLS Guidelines: initial write-up on how a design system should be approached

    [WiP] PLS Guidelines: initial write-up on how a design system should be approached

    [WiP] PLS Vision presentation that unfortunately was never given due to shifting company priorities at that time

    [WiP] PLS Vision presentation that unfortunately was never given due to shifting company priorities at that time

• Initiated effort for the Design team to participate in Figma's Orgs (beta) program as a possible replacement of our clunky Sketch+InVision workflow

  • Business case:
    • Consolidated web-based workflow allowed for a single source of truth amongst Design/Product/Engineering
      • Envisioned Content Strategists being able to polish their copy on already-designed screens rather than guessing on separate GDocs
      • Aids the Security team in their software management workflow
    • Single point for collaboration and communication; comments were made in InVision+GDocs+Jira, which made it hard to track
    • Increased visibility for work-in-progress projects

v2 Results

• Office hours had mixed results as there wasn't sustained interest from the various teams and the working group to attend regularly
  • Some of the working group members were also recruited for a company-wide project to introduce Agile/Scrum methodology as a productivity focus for 2019
• Managed to complete the long process of all the Security, Legal/Compliance reviews and business contract signing, only to realize in the end that Figma's OAuth system was incompatible 😓
  • Security team was very confident of their ability to create a workaround, but by this time we had reached the end of 2018, and there was insufficient appetite to attempt complex work until the beginning of 2019