Led the strategy for governance, shared patterns, accessibility, adoption, and cross-product design operations.
Lead UX Strategist / Design Systems Lead
Enterprise UX Systems
Building an enterprise design system is rarely a design problem. It is an operating model, tooling, budget, and adoption problem.
Coordinated tool evaluation, stakeholder alignment, access paths, rollout needs, and budget tradeoffs.
Improved consistency, accelerated collaboration, reduced duplication, and lowered platform costs.
The ask sounded like a component problem. The reality was an operating model problem.
The initial assumption was that Bayer needed a design system. Discovery quickly showed the problem was much larger.
Across the organization, multiple product teams had created their own component libraries, interaction patterns, and brand implementations. Designers were deeply embedded within individual product groups, creating tribal knowledge that made it difficult to move between teams or contribute across products. Branding requirements frequently conflicted with accessibility standards, resulting in inconsistent user experiences and duplicated effort throughout the organization.
Instead of asking "What components are missing?" we reframed the question to "Why hasn't a shared system emerged?"
Disconnected systems
Product teams had local libraries, one-off workflows, and inconsistent interaction patterns.
Brand versus WCAG friction
Brand standards and accessibility needs frequently created tradeoffs without shared decision rights.
Adoption risk
A new library would fail unless teams had incentives, support, and ownership in the system.
Discovery focused on behaviors and decision rights, not just UI inventory
The team audited existing products, tools, libraries, brand implementations, accessibility gaps, and team behaviors. Interviews and workshops included designers, PMs, engineers, research partners, and product leadership.
Audit products and libraries
Interview designers, PMs, and engineers
Surface governance blockers
Map duplicated patterns
Define contribution model
Pilot with product teams
Expand adoption
Workshop artifact
Workshop outputs helped the team align without exposing sensitive product details
Whiteboard sessions gave designers, PMs, engineers, and leaders a shared place to sort patterns, ownership questions, exceptions, and adoption blockers. For portfolio use, the artifact is intentionally abstracted so it communicates the working method without revealing internal content.
The system needed enterprise consistency with intentional flexibility
Rather than creating another design library, we defined the initiative as an enterprise governance problem.
The goal became establishing a shared foundation that every product team could adopt without removing the flexibility needed for unique business requirements.
Standardize
Core components, reusable interaction patterns, accessibility requirements, and documentation standards.
Govern
Contribution models, design champions, decision rights, and shared ownership across product teams.
Flex
Clear divergence rules for moments where product context, brand needs, or workflow complexity required variation.
One of the biggest lessons was recognizing that governance required ownership throughout the organization. Design champions were identified within each product group to provide feedback, advocate for adoption, and help evolve the system alongside the teams using it.
Governance became a network of ownership
The design system connected product teams, engineering, accessibility, brand, UX Ops, and design champions through feedback, contribution, standards, exceptions, and adoption loops.
Product teams
Engineering
Accessibility
Enterprise Design System
Brand
Design champions
UX Ops
System artifact
Governance became tangible through a shared component foundation
A Bayer-aligned component system made the operating model visible: shared navigation, buttons, tabs, list rows, fields, menus, drawers, states, and accessibility patterns that teams could adopt instead of rebuilding locally.
Rollout happened incrementally, not through a big-bang launch
Implementation happened incrementally rather than through a single launch.
As Bayer transitioned to a new design platform, the migration became an opportunity to standardize tooling alongside the design system itself. Rather than asking teams to change twice, both efforts were combined into a single organizational initiative.
The design system was continuously refined through workshops, usability sessions with designers, engineering feedback, and pilot implementations across multiple products.
This iterative approach allowed the system to mature while maintaining trust with product teams.
Tooling was part of the adoption strategy
I also acted as a PM for the UX platform transition: coordinating evaluation, clearing access paths for designers and partner teams, aligning stakeholders, and controlling for budget as the organization moved away from fragmented tools.
Fragmented licenses
Adobe, Sketch, InVision, researcher-specific tools, ad-hoc Zoom sessions, Teams, and inconsistent workshop spaces.
Standardized UX platform
Figma for shared libraries and collaboration, UserZoom for research transparency, and Miro for discovery workshops and shared maps.
The toolchain made the governed path easier to follow
The most important criterion was choosing tools people wanted to use. Figma enabled shared libraries, component versioning, developer inspect, and live cross-team collaboration. UserZoom created a research environment with observation, recordings, shared notes, and more transparent stakeholder participation. Miro provided a common space for discovery workshops, journey maps, service blueprints, affinity mapping, and cross-functional planning.
The toolchain did not just support the system. It made the system easier to adopt.
The result was more than a component library
The result was more than a component library.
The organization established a scalable UX operating model that enabled designers to contribute across products, reduced duplication between teams, improved accessibility compliance, and created shared patterns that engineering could implement consistently.
The platform migration also reduced licensing costs significantly while maintaining the capabilities required by the design organization, demonstrating that governance improvements could create measurable operational savings alongside better user experiences.
Consistency
Shared patterns and reusable components reduced local reinvention across products.
Adoption
Shared tooling, design champions, and contribution paths made the governed system easier for teams to use.
Executive value
Tool consolidation paired adoption with measurable cost reduction and operational clarity.
What actually made the system work
A design system is not successful because it has great components.
It is successful because people choose to use it.
The most valuable investment was not building buttons or documentation. It was creating governance, identifying champions within product teams, and designing a system flexible enough that people wanted to adopt it instead of creating another one.
Great UX organizations do not just design products. They design how products get designed.