In order to understand the unique needs of each team, I interviewed members of the product management, development and design teams to get an understanding of their current process, pain points and what they needed from a design system.

From there, I summarized my findings and provided a list of needs for each team as well as key factors for launching a successful design system at Lumin Digital.

Because the new design system would be replacing the design and development teams' UI kits (both separate at the beginning), I knew that the right solution would require buy-in and collaboration from both sides, and that the new solution had to also work better than the existing system.

Based on my research findings on how new requirements went from design to development, I provided a visual proposal of how each of the teams could work together in a more integrated, collaborative and efficient manner.

Once the proposed solution was approved, my next step was to get an inventory of all the components being used in our Sketch Library and the development team's component library. I went through all of our Sketch files saved in Abstract and started to document our components, and then did the same for the development side. Doing this helped me get an understanding of what components were duplicates, unused, or missing.

Using Notion, I created a document that organized our components by category, variations, states, mobile/desktop version, action(s) needed and file location.

Once I had all of our components documented and prioritized, I began to reconcile and update our design components to match what we had in the product and the development team's UI kit.

At the time, our Sketch Library was seldom used, not built for scale and had a lot of components that were out-of-date. As I updated the library, I also built a scalable color, typography and component system that allowed us to make updates to our design system at a much faster pace.