A system that scales.
A structured, centralized source of reusable design assets, bringing consistency, scalability, and faster implementation across the global design org.
Assets everywhere. A system nowhere.
Design assets sat scattered across files, complicating discovery and slowing every new designer’s ramp. Similar components lived in many variants and versions across domains, subsystems had no bridge into product work, and there was no governance to audit quality at scale.
I designed the reference library model that fixed it: domain-aligned libraries that translate subsystem patterns into scalable product solutions, governed by a controlled publishing workflow.
Consistency, made operational.
Centralizing files was the easy part. The hard questions were operational: where an asset lives as it matures, who evaluates it for broader adoption, and how updates reach every domain without breaking downstream experiences. The answer was a layered system with a clear job for every library, and one controlled way to publish and update.
Four pains, one root cause.
Scattered assets, duplicate variants across orgs, no clearly defined bridge for contribution to funnel new components from domain levels to support the maturity of the core subsystems and foundational DS.
Five layers, one system.
Standardizing reference libraries, allows design domains to catalogue their components and patterns which can be pushed to the surface library level where new designs are reviewed by a council.
Assets vs. interfaces.
Training designers to catalogue their design artifacts in a reference library helped centralize the source of their designs being rendered throughout various design files
Controlled publishing.
Designers experienced a more efficient process building & publishing from a library, which reduced their need to touch various components and just make one change in one place that updated everywhere else.
Having our team’s work organized like this makes my life so much easier. I never want to go back to the old way we used to design, this is so much better!
One source of truth, every domain building on it.
The first reference libraries were piloted before going live, bridging subsystem patterns into domain templates and flows, with a surface library where new candidates wait for design council review.
Consistency is not a value statement, it is a workflow. Branch, review, merge, publish. That rhythm is what turned scattered files into operational maturity, and I would build it first again.