Design SystemsUX StrategyDesign Leadership
Building a design function from zero
Five products, dozens of developers, and no designer had ever worked there. I set the strategy, argued for sequencing over a simultaneous rewrite, and built the system, process and principles the team now runs on. This is systems and leadership work, not a single-screen redesign.
- Role
- Lead Product Designer, first designer at the company
- Team
- Engineering, account management, support
- Timeline
- Jul 2025 – present
- Platform
- Enterprise ITSM · five products
- Problem
- Five products, dozens of developers, no designer ever, and no system or consistency between any of them.
- Outcome
- A year in: a design system adopted across products, research as routine, and design run as a function, not a person.
The outcome and results. Switch to Deep dive for the full process.
What I've accomplished so far
- Built Hornbill's first-ever design function from zero: the strategy, system, process and principles.
- A design system now adopted across all five products, so new screens start from good defaults.
- Research running as routine and a repeatable process the team uses without me driving every step.
- Proved it by leading a full rebuild of Knowledge, which lifted user satisfaction on the product by 34%.
- Integrated the design system with AI tooling so the team can spin up fast prototypes.
That’s the short version. There’s a lot more behind each decision.