ShopBack Design System: from 30% to 80% adoption

Role

Senior product designer and design system lead

Team

2 product designers, with mobile platform engineers on iOS and Android

Stack

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Outcome

Adoption up from 30% to 80% in 18 months

Adoption of the ShopBack Design System (SBDS) started as a side project. Feature teams pushed back on the extra effort, and about 30% of features used it. I led 2 designers to change that. Engineering leads were sceptical, so I made the case with an ROI model and a pilot. In Q3 2023 adoption became a team-level objective with an 80% target, and a dashboard tracked it feature by feature. Then I set up governance so teams kept using it: contribution guidelines, reviews and office hours every two weeks.

The year by year story is in State of ShopBack Design Systems.