Tags: Design Systems · Product Design · DesignOps · International UX

Context: BOLD (Zety), 2019-2026

Type: Design Leadership + IC contribution

The Starting Point

When I joined BOLD in 2019, the NGB platform had no Design System. There were loose components scattered across the codebase, inconsistent styles between views, and no shared visual language between design and development. Every new feature started from scratch. Every market adaptation created new divergence.

Six years later, the same system served 4 brands, 10 language variants, and was the infrastructure on which dozens of concurrent A/B experiments ran every month. This is the story of how that happened.

The Challenge

Building a Design System for a single product is a known problem. Building one that works across multiple brands, multiple languages, and multiple markets simultaneously, while also supporting a continuous experimentation culture, is a different order of complexity.

The three dimensions had to work together:

• Technical: Architecture that could hold multiple brand expressions without duplicating everything
• Organisational: A team structure that connected design output, development implementation, and UX Writing in a single coherent system
• Scale: A matrix of views that covered every combination of market, language, and brand without becoming unmanageable

None of these could be solved independently. Changes to the architecture had organisational consequences. Scale decisions affected how the team needed to work. The three threads had to be developed in parallel.

My Role

I initiated the Design System from scratch and owned its strategic direction throughout. I defined the architecture approach, led the team responsible for its development, secured the resources needed to evolve it, and made the structural decisions that allowed it to scale. At the same time, I remained hands-on in the early phases, contributing directly to the system alongside the team.

How It Was Built