Silo // 2022–2025
Silo Design System
Overview
At the time I joined Silo, its design system was in its infancy—efforts made towards it were purely voluntary and few and far between. As the company was growing and building products at a rapid pace, I took the opportunity to own, maintain, and grow the design system to increase efficiency and level up our design language at Silo.
Role: Lead Designer
Led design system initiatives, from building components and establishing process, to driving cross-team adoption and making the case for design system investment across the organization.
Timeline: 3 years
June 2022 – 2025
The challenge
Without a functioning design system, product design and engineering were duplicating work, shipping inconsistently, and slogging through feature development. With no dedicated team, little progress had been made to establish a foundation, cultivate process, or drive it forward.
Unfinished
There were only a handful of designed components, and even less implemented in code. The designs were limited and lacked documentation.
Under the radar
There was no visibility across the prod/eng team or broader company, so it wasn’t on anyone’s mind (let alone their workstreams).
Stale
With no ownership or driving force, the design system had no path to growth. Sometimes it got worked on, but that was the exception, not the rule.
It was time to take the beginnings of this design system and turn it into a living, breathing system.
This would increase velocity for design and development, create a more consistent and stable platform, and improve usability.
How to do it?
My approach to getting this done involved education to communicate value, process to provide transparency and alignment, and execution to see meaningful results.
The process
take ownership
Start from the ground up
My first order of business was to assess where things stood and start building real momentum — making sure the right people knew this work was happening and understood why it mattered.
Design Audit: to understand current platform and implementation of design system.
Recurring Syncs: dedicated time for ongoing check-ins and conversations.
Recruit champions: identified cross-team individuals who were excited about Silo UI and could share in the ownership and vision of the design system.
create a game plan
Define an approach
For this team, an incremental approach to building up the system made the most sense — it let us make consistent progress without pulling focus from product work, and meant every component we shipped had immediate real-world application.
For example, if a new project design involved banners in the UI, we would work on a banner component in the design system to implement alongside that feature development.
Build understanding, together
Generating real cross-functional investment was just as important as building the components and styles. I made it a priority to understand what engineering and product actually needed from the design system to solidify the value and instill motivation for everyone.
Design System “wishlist”: I sent out a survey to the engineering and product teams to take a pulse of how things are going today. What was working well? What did they feel was missing? Where were the significant gaps?
Impact/Efforts matrix: I led a workshop for my design team where we identified, evaluated, and prioritized initiatives from a design perspective. This provided a detailed view of potential projects to work into the roadmap in a realistic way (avoiding biting off more than we can chew).
Chart a course
The roadmap not only reflected the collective team’s ideas and needs, but was also realistic and conducive to a collaborative working process. Putting together an official sequence of work gave the design system legs and changed how the organization viewed it. It was no longer a side project, it was planned work with visibility, accountability, and a clear path forward.
Project planning and tracking: One place for anyone to see what’s in flight, what’s coming up, and how they can contribute.
Illustrate the big picture: Providing context and education around the value of design systems and the vision for ours.
Reiterate the approach: Keeping everyone aligned and reminded of how we work, risks involved, and overall strategy for getting things done.
Show progress: Highlighting accomplishments and improvements that were making real impact on the platform for our users.
get to work
Flexible project planning
I modeled the sequencing of projects to align with our incremental and flexible approach to work. At the start of each quarter, we would nail down the projects as a team. These would consist of one large project, and many small projects—small projects could be swapped in and out depending on work that may align with product-led projects.
Design ops ftw: To make this process really work, I created a work tracker in Notion so anyone can see what work is in flight, prioritized or deprioritized, ready for dev, etc.
Stay in the loop
Visibility was a key part of the strategy. I regularly shared progress and wins at all-hands meetings and product discussions — not just to report status, but to build a shared understanding of what good design systems work looks like and why it matters. Over time, this shifted the conversation from what is this? to when can we get this done?
Silo UI
The design system has grown to house a robust set of working components and documentation that is accessible and easy to modify if needed. I put processes in place to facilitate asking questions, requesting work, and keeping track of in-flight progress. All of this has contributed to an increased momentum and newly found excitement around Silo UI, and we’re only just getting started.
Impact
Since I picked up ownership of Silo UI, we saw over 200% growth in designed and implemented components, and replaced legacy code and frameworks that led to a significant reduction in issues relating to stability and performance.
Beyond the component growth, the design system became a foundation for how we work — teams moved faster, design decisions were more consistent, and the product became more accessible and scalable from a platform perspective.
Lastly, the maturity of the design system opened up avenues for design education and best practice guidelines, so teams feel empowered to make informed design decisions in their day-to-day work.
Takeaways
The importance of foundations. The most important foundation I built wasn't in Figma — it was the relationships with engineering and product that made people actually want to be involved. Processes, components, color palettes — all of it is easier when there's shared ownership and a team that's invested in the outcome. That was the real breakthrough for Silo UI, and it's something I'd carry into any design system work going forward.