Tags: Design Systems · Product Design · DesignOps · International UX
Context: BOLD (Zety), 2019-2026
Type: Design Leadership + IC contribution
When I joined BOLD in May 2019, the product department consisted of two Product Managers and one designer: me. The NGB platform was being built for international markets, and design was a single-person function with no process, no system, and no research practice.
Six years later, I was running a 17-person organization spanning five distinct disciplines across 10 international markets, reporting to a VP of Design in San Francisco, with three Design Leads I had grown from individual contributors.
This is the story of how that happened.
The first priority was not hiring. It was establishing what design would mean in this organization.
Design System work started from scratch. The existing codebase carried significant technical debt in how UI components were built and maintained. I initiated the Design System to create a shared language between design and development, reducing back-and-forth on implementation, shortening delivery cycles, and making the product consistent across markets. Collaboration with development had to be rebuilt from the ground up: clearer handoffs, agreed standards, shared ownership of quality.
My technical background was directly useful here. I managed Google Tag Manager implementations across all brands, wrote custom JavaScript programs that integrated data flows between HotJar, analytics systems, and the product, and used AI to build code deployed in Google Sheets that connected to a server-side script to extract SEO parameters from all active brands. The entire solution was designed, tested, and deployed within a few hours and worked as a native spreadsheet function. This kind of contribution, coming from a design manager, built trust with engineering in a way that would have been harder to earn otherwise.
At the same time, the team's working culture shifted toward experimentation. We set up an A/B testing pipeline and grounded every design decision in a combination of user research findings and quantitative data. This was not just a tooling change. It was a shift in how the team thought about its work. Design stopped being about delivery and started being about hypothesis validation.
Design Sprints became a regular practice during this period. Each Sprint was structured to generate testable hypotheses, some of which went directly into the experiment pipeline and produced winning A/B results.
Product knowledge grew significantly across the team, supported by both internal knowledge-sharing sessions and external training. The goal was a team that could reason about business outcomes, not just design outputs.
One system I built entirely from scratch during this phase was SkillMaps. Each designer on the team had a defined skills profile mapping their current proficiency across relevant competencies. This profile served three purposes: identifying training needs, shaping personal development plans, and giving each designer ownership of their own growth by choosing three skills to focus on developing in the coming quarter. The system was self-authored and built specifically for our team's context — not adapted from an external framework.
By the end of this phase, the team had grown from 1 to 7, the Design System was operational, the experiment culture was established, and the organization had a real foundation to scale from.