Enterprise Design System

Driving consistency, accessibility, and delivery speed across 1,200+ enterprise web pages.

The Digital Marketing organization managed multiple external websites that had evolved independently over time. Teams frequently created custom UI components, resulting in inconsistent customer experiences, increased maintenance costs, accessibility gaps, and slower product delivery.

To address these challenges, I led the product strategy and delivery of an Enterprise Design System (EDS), transforming it into a shared platform that standardized reusable components, improved governance, and accelerated delivery across all external marketing websites.

The Challenge

As our digital ecosystem expanded, each product team built components independently.

This created several business problems:

  • More than 100 custom UI components with duplicate functionality

  • Inconsistent branding and user experience across websites

  • High engineering effort spent maintaining similar components

  • Accessibility compliance risks

  • Limited analytics due to inconsistent implementations

  • Significant technical debt from hand-coded elements

Without a standardized platform, product teams were moving slower while operational costs continued to increase.

My Role

As Product Owner, I owned the strategy and roadmap for the Enterprise Design System.

Responsibilities

  • Defined product vision and roadmap

  • Prioritized component backlog

  • Conducted stakeholder discovery

  • Led component audit initiative

  • Established governance model

  • Partnered with Design, Engineering, Accessibility, Legal, and Marketing Teams

  • Drove adoption across multiple teams

  • Defined success metrics and measured business outcomes

Discovery

To understand where the greatest opportunities existed, I initiated an enterprise-wide component audit.

The audit evaluated:

  • Duplicate components

  • Component usage

  • Accessibility compliance

  • Brand consistency

  • Technical debt

  • Opportunities for consolidation

Key Findings

  • Multiple versions of the same components existed.

  • Teams rebuilt components instead of reusing existing ones.

  • Accessibility implementation varied significantly.

  • Hand-coded components slowed releases.

  • Documentation was inconsistent.

These insights became the foundation for the product strategy & roadmap.

Product Strategy

Rather than treating the initiative as a design project, I positioned the Enterprise Design System as an internal platform product.

The strategy focused on five pillars:

Standardization

Create reusable enterprise components that supported all external websites.

Governance

Introduce contribution guidelines, approval workflows, and version management.

Accessibility

Embed WCAG 2.2 AA compliance into every reusable component.

Scalability

Enable product teams to build faster without sacrificing consistency.

Operational Efficiency

Reduce technical debt and eliminate redundant engineering work.

Roadmap

  • Phase 1

    • Component audit

    • Usage analysis

    • Accessibility assessment

    • Component prioritization

  • Phase 2

    • Refresh and modernize existing components

    • Consolidate duplicate components

    • Retire obsolete components

    • Improve documentation

  • Phase 3

    • Enterprise rollout

    • Migration support

    • Training sessions

    • Governance process

    • Adoption metrics

Execution

Regular roadmap reviews and governance meetings ensured priorities remained aligned with business goals.

The first release focused on the highest-impact components used across every marketing site.

Component Improvements

  • Retired 14 obsolete components

  • Consolidated 6 duplicate components

  • Refreshed 19 enterprise components

  • Updated over 1,200 pages

Every reusable component was reviewed for:

  • Accessibility

  • Brand consistency

  • Analytics instrumentation

  • Documentation

  • Reusability

Execution & Results

  • 14

    Obsolete components retired

  • 6

    Duplicate components consolidated

  • 19

    Components refreshed

  • 1,2000+

    Pages updated

  • 100%

    Acessibility compliant

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