Building a design system that scaled to 12 products, not just one.
Building design systems that flex to each client's brand and scale — from Dream11's internal consistency to a single system unifying hundreds of Openreach/British Telecom applications
Role
Duration
Tools
Team
Project Overview
Design Systems shows me adapting my approach client by client — auditing hundreds of Openreach/BT applications before touching a single component, while proactively recommending systems to clients who hadn't even asked.
5+
Domains
12
Design system crafted
70%
Improvised products
Problem Statement
Each client came with a different design system problem. Dream11 needed consistency across its internal applications that still aligned with its brand. Openreach/British Telecom was the largest challenge: hundreds of existing applications with no shared system, so before any component work could start, the applications had to be audited to find the common patterns worth standardizing. Other clients needed a design system built from scratch and components, tokens, and documentation with nothing to consolidate from. Without a shared system, every team was duplicating components, applying inconsistent patterns, and slowing down design-to-development handoff.
What I Led
Set the design system strategy per client, scaled to their actual problem — consolidation for Openreach/BT, brand-consistency for Dream11, ground-up build for others
Proactively recommended a design system to several clients myself, where none had been requested, to bring their app experience in line with their brand
Defined the governance model: contribution process, review cadence, versioning
Directed the audit of hundreds of Openreach/British Telecom applications to identify the common system worth standardizing
What I Designed
Built the foundational design tokens (color, type, spacing, elevation)
Designed the core component library: Buttons, forms, navigation, data tables, etc.
Wrote the documentation and usage guidelines for each component
Designed the contribution and review workflow used by other designers
Key Decisions & Trade Offs
Audit-first approach for Openreach/BT: reviewed hundreds of existing applications before designing anything new, to build one common system rather than another one-off slower to start, but the only way to get real cross-team adoption.
Zeroheight + code plugin handoff: invested time in packaging the system as a ready-to-use code plugin, which cost extra setup work but measurably cut development effort by removing manual rebuild.
Scaling the approach per client instead of one template: matched the system's depth to each client's actual need (brand-consistency vs. full build vs. consolidation), rather than applying the same process everywhere.
AI-assisted token definition: used Figma AI to help generate and test rational color and token decisions on a recent project, keeping final selection and QA human-led.
Final Design
Impact
54%
Reduction in rework
60%
Improvised design components
12+
Improvised process
70%+ utilization of the design systems across the teams they were built for, with strong positive feedback from both design and engineering
Reduced development effort and time via the Zeroheight code-plugin handoff, since developers could pull ready-made components instead of rebuilding them
Unified hundreds of previously inconsistent Openreach/British Telecom applications under one common system
Brought brand-aligned consistency to Dream11's internal applications
Leadership Moment
On several client accounts, no one asked for a design system — I did. I saw the inconsistency building up across their applications and proactively suggested building a system so their product experience would actually reflect their brand, rather than drifting further apart with every new feature. That recommendation is what started the design system work on those accounts.
