While sharing visuals of the Dimension Design System and its paired documentation site is against Hologram's content-sharing policy, showcasing our year-end 2022 report has been approved:
I can also speak to the responsibilities as a hybrid product manager and lead designer of the Dimension team.
Some of those responsibilities include:
- First dedicated design systems (DS) hire post Series B charged with building a systems practice to enable rapid growth of the company and scale of the product suite
- Served as Product Manager and Lead Designer for the Dimension Design System Team supporting an evolving product, design, and engineering (PDE) department
- Built out resource and headcount plan for the dedicated systems team to support company growth goals
- Advocated for, scoped, and facilitated the hiring of second DS hire (an Engineering Lead)
- Built out a design systems career path from Associate to Head of Design Systems complete with craft-based competencies, leveling structure, and job descriptions
- Guide, mentor, and train design team on systems thinking, component and style usage, accessibility adherence, as well as visual design and UX best practices
- Serve as a DesignOps co-lead in a fractional capacity specifically managing Figma Organization structure and library management, as well as team-wide ritual management and process improvement
As Product Manager:
- Owned the product strategy and roadmap of a ground-up design system program resulting in the successful design, implementation, and rollout of the Dimension Design System from ideation to Alpha to 1.0.0
- Implemented an end-to-end feature delivery process to scope, build, and deliver components, design tokens, and documentation for the Dimension Design System
- Coordinated across Product, Design, and Engineering departments to prioritize and scope highest value components for a phased delivery model
- Prioritized and advocated for an accessibility-first framework within Design and Engineering to help increase product accessibility scores contingent on system adoption
- Facilitated discussions around convergence/divergence of visual style, asset and theme ownership, as well as adoption planning with PDE leadership
- Facilitated learning sessions, weekly critiques, incremental listening tours, and bi-weekly office hour sessions to ensure the consuming community had direct access to the DS team and could provide input to shape the roadmap
- Delivered a net-new design tokens infrastructure enabling conversion of legacy experience and one-off componetry to abide by DS visual style without becoming a delivery blocker
- Wrote a multi-product theming strategy to support the eventual “system of systems” goal enabling cross-product cohesion and functional parity
- Facilitated annual sentiment survey activities and industry standard feature heuristic analysis to compare pre- and post-DS ecosystem resulting in a net increase in tooling stability (code, documentation, feature availability, process, and strategy quality) by an average of 1.6 on a rating scale from 0 to 4
- Delivered features meeting 75% of use cases served by legacy systems in addition to a fully revamped set of refined iconography glyphs
- Based on current engineering team size, utilization of the system forecasts initial savings of 2.5 months of capacity per year with a potential increase as adoption increases
As Lead Designer:
- Built and maintained a series of dependent Figma libraries providing 1:1 parity with production-ready React components
- Assessed and delivered WCAG compliant color and space system via design tokens
- Collaborated with engineering, product design, and content design partners to author, review, edit, and publish technical system documentation
- Pre-engineering support: lead the rebuild and conversion an existing UI Kit from Sketch to Figma to reach legacy component library parity supporting short-term design team growth as the formal systems program laid its foundation
- Collaborated with design team to perform audit and discovery tasks for surfacing alignment opportunities within individual feature roadmaps and in service of DS feature contribution
- Served as Product Manager and Lead Designer for the Dimension Design System Team supporting an evolving product, design, and engineering (PDE) department
- Built out resource and headcount plan for the dedicated systems team to support company growth goals
- Advocated for, scoped, and facilitated the hiring of second DS hire (an Engineering Lead)
- Built out a design systems career path from Associate to Head of Design Systems complete with craft-based competencies, leveling structure, and job descriptions
- Guide, mentor, and train design team on systems thinking, component and style usage, accessibility adherence, as well as visual design and UX best practices
- Serve as a DesignOps co-lead in a fractional capacity specifically managing Figma Organization structure and library management, as well as team-wide ritual management and process improvement
As Product Manager:
- Owned the product strategy and roadmap of a ground-up design system program resulting in the successful design, implementation, and rollout of the Dimension Design System from ideation to Alpha to 1.0.0
- Implemented an end-to-end feature delivery process to scope, build, and deliver components, design tokens, and documentation for the Dimension Design System
- Coordinated across Product, Design, and Engineering departments to prioritize and scope highest value components for a phased delivery model
- Prioritized and advocated for an accessibility-first framework within Design and Engineering to help increase product accessibility scores contingent on system adoption
- Facilitated discussions around convergence/divergence of visual style, asset and theme ownership, as well as adoption planning with PDE leadership
- Facilitated learning sessions, weekly critiques, incremental listening tours, and bi-weekly office hour sessions to ensure the consuming community had direct access to the DS team and could provide input to shape the roadmap
- Delivered a net-new design tokens infrastructure enabling conversion of legacy experience and one-off componetry to abide by DS visual style without becoming a delivery blocker
- Wrote a multi-product theming strategy to support the eventual “system of systems” goal enabling cross-product cohesion and functional parity
- Facilitated annual sentiment survey activities and industry standard feature heuristic analysis to compare pre- and post-DS ecosystem resulting in a net increase in tooling stability (code, documentation, feature availability, process, and strategy quality) by an average of 1.6 on a rating scale from 0 to 4
- Delivered features meeting 75% of use cases served by legacy systems in addition to a fully revamped set of refined iconography glyphs
- Based on current engineering team size, utilization of the system forecasts initial savings of 2.5 months of capacity per year with a potential increase as adoption increases
As Lead Designer:
- Built and maintained a series of dependent Figma libraries providing 1:1 parity with production-ready React components
- Assessed and delivered WCAG compliant color and space system via design tokens
- Collaborated with engineering, product design, and content design partners to author, review, edit, and publish technical system documentation
- Pre-engineering support: lead the rebuild and conversion an existing UI Kit from Sketch to Figma to reach legacy component library parity supporting short-term design team growth as the formal systems program laid its foundation
- Collaborated with design team to perform audit and discovery tasks for surfacing alignment opportunities within individual feature roadmaps and in service of DS feature contribution
System Evangelism
During Schema by Figma, a multi-city, international design systems conference series, I presented on "Establishing early evangelists: from sentiment gathering to strategic roadmapping". Below is the recording from that session.
