‹ All work
Design system,
Tessel,
2023
One design system for four product teams
Merging 212 components into 74, with tokens, a Figma library and docs engineers actually use.
Company
Tessel
Role
Design system lead
Team
One engineer from each of four teams
Timeline
Eight months, 2023
Platform
Design system
The short version
1 min
Problem
Four teams had built 212 components between them, including 14 different date pickers.
What I did
Audited every screen, merged the duplicates, and set up tokens, a Figma library and docs with one engineer from each team.
Result
74 components, and new screens built in about half the time.
My role
Design system lead.
Context
Tessel sells analytics software built by four product teams. Each team had its own buttons, tables and date pickers, and customers could tell.
My role
I led the system from the audit to adoption, working with one engineer from each team and reporting to the head of design.
Research
We screenshotted every screen in the product and sorted 212 components into piles on a wall. Fourteen of them were date pickers.
212
Components found
14
Date pickers
4
Product teams
“I’d rather build a new table than find the old one.”
Frontend engineer
Duplicates, not gaps.
Teams weren’t missing components. They had too many.
Docs lived in heads.
Nobody could find which version was current.
Tokens were hardcoded.
Colors were typed in by hand in 600 places.
Approach
We merged the most-used components first, starting with tables, inputs and date pickers, and shipped them team by team instead of in one big release.
Solution
The system has 74 components, one set of tokens shared by Figma and code, and a docs site with usage rules for each component.
Result
Components
2×
Faster new screens
4 of 4
Teams on the system
All four teams moved to the system within a year. Design reviews now talk about the problem instead of the padding.
What I learned
A design system is adopted, not launched. Shipping it team by team mattered more than any single component.
Next project
An AI shopping assistant →
Global retailer,
Web app,
2026
Under NDA