Democratising design systems within a fast-paced, tech dominated and global organisation.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Services
Design system
Design operations
Leadership
GfK¹ provides data and intelligence to the consumer goods industry. It collects data on over 180 million SKUs and surveys over two million people in 15 countries, working in compliance with market and social research associations to provides real-time insight into market activity.
I’ve been brought to lead the design system team to create, manage and improve its process and governance alongside other product disciplines. This contributes to elevate the design function across the company.
The biggest goal for this role was to democratise access to design systems. Anyone within the company should be able to contribute their ideas and have them heard.
Few weeks in, while I was still discovering and learning the good, the bad and the ugly about our design systems, or lack thereof, across the key functions. I’ve started to focus on the actionable.
Understanding quickly the most crucial needs helped me to prioritise the areas of work where to make greater impact in an efficient manner. Surfacing rapidly these results to stakeholders reassured the value of my effort and allowed me spend qualitative time to create strong relationships prior educating and establishing new fundamentals to the organisation.
By sharing every taken step transparently nurtured strong trust between all involved parts. This helped to maintain high confidence even when things were sometime going south.
Today, these new processes are in place and run smoothly. A growing community is advocating for our design system and its contribution.
Selected Works
