The first job was trust
This project had been grinding for two years, inside a company that saw designers as decorators. My first job wasn’t building a design system …it was earning the trust.
A rebuild that had stalled
Obi4wan’s media monitoring product was being rebuilt, and it wasn’t going well. The dev team had been at it for two years and was worn down. Product managers came and went, so the direction kept shifting. And the design was seen as nice to have, not as part of the decisions and roadmap.
There was no foundation
The existantial problem was the lack of good foundation. A proper design foundation, with leadership, that built trust in a system they could depend on. And it made them believe in the product again.
One system, and the trust to back it
Built a scalable design system as the backbone, then rebuilt the product on top: responsive, consistent, ready for what comes next. Ran design critiques and cross-functional roadmap sessions with dev, product, support and marketing, so the design held up against real constraints.
Less rebuilding, more belief
Up to 20% productivity gain, more than 10 features rebuilt on the system. Trust in designers isn’t decoration, it’s leverage. And most of the sharpest insights came from customer support, not the dev team.
Foundation before pixels
The principle is timeless: build the foundation before the features. Today I’d prototype and stress-test variations faster with AI-assisted tools, but the judgment stays the same, know where the real bottleneck is before you touch a pixel.
