[Placeholder] Design system for a payroll admin product
Built the tokens, patterns, and documentation site that unified six payroll products on one visual language and let teams ship 3× faster.
Context
Six payroll products had grown up next to each other across two acquisitions. They shared customers but no visual language, which made the suite feel incoherent to anyone who used more than one.
Problem
Each team had its own pattern library, its own date picker, and its own definition of “primary button”. Accessibility was uneven — some products failed WCAG AA on contrast, others shipped unlabelled form inputs. Audits were ballooning.
My role
System lead across three design teams and two engineering groups. I set the token architecture, ran the component inventory, and wrote the documentation site that was eventually adopted by the wider org as a model.
Process
We audited components in use, consolidated to a shared primitives set, and introduced a semantic token layer so themes and compliance tweaks became one-line changes. Adoption was staged product by product with migration guides.
Key decisions
Tokens by role, not by appearance. One date picker, one data table, one empty state — opinionated by default, escape hatches documented. Docs site in the same repo as code so examples never drift from reality.
Outcome
After one year: ~85% component reuse across all six products, accessibility scores up from averaging 72 to 94, and time from “new feature briefed” to “feature in production” fell from ~6 weeks to ~2.