Cardinal Design System
Company: Transamerica
Role: Design Lead, Senior UX Designer
Date: May 2018 – Oct 2020
The bottom line
As one of Transamerica’s foundational designers, my leadership on the Workplace Experience (WX) product led the team to select me for an enterprise challenge. When our centralized design system lost its funding, compromising visual and interactive consistency across seven B2B and B2C properties, I stepped in as Design Lead. I supported the success of the system by transitioning it to an open-contribution guild model, supporting 20+ UX professionals and protecting brand equity.
The friction
Without dedicated funding, seven independent products began building features in isolation, risking fragmentation. Having just designed the WX product, I knew our fast-moving teams couldn't afford to reinvent components. We did not just need a static UI kit; we needed a sustainable way for our expanding internal design team to co-own global standards.
The strategy
I leveraged the trust built from my WX product success to unify our cross-functional partners and establish decentralized alignment.
Architecting the federated framework: Created clear component intake workflows and managed a comprehensive design backlog, shifting the system from a defunded bottleneck to an open governance model.
Rigorous system auditing: Spearheaded global pattern evaluations, mapping out visual and interaction detail spectrums to serve as a scalable blueprint for product layouts.
Engineering-ready deployment: Facilitated technical collaboration between design and development squads, ensuring our visual assets mapped directly into an engineering-ready framework.
The impact
By replacing a closed team structure with a high-trust, cross-functional design guild, we successfully continued the scaling of the Cardinal Design System across the entire corporate ecosystem. This structural pivot permanently protected our high-craft visual standards and optimized product feature velocity throughout organizational growth.