Design System at Scale

Google Cloud

Engineering Lead, Material Design

Jul 2020 — Jul 2022 · Seattle, WA

Led a multi-year mission to reinvent Cloud Console’s frontend strategy by overhauling its Design System approach and surrounding tooling ecosystem. The Google Cloud Web Console is likely one of the largest enterprise Angular applications in the world, if not the largest, and my team owned the Design System powering it.

Context

MaterialDesign System refresh

MillionsLines of frontend code

ThousandsDownstream Google engineers

Angular+ TypeScript, GraphQL

The Design System team had taken on an extremely centralized role in frontend development — something that was hurting product-wide velocity, as well as the team itself. There was also a strong business need to update the platform’s styling to the latest Google Material guidelines, but it had been unable to do so for years due to the sheer volume of existing frontend code.

As the strategic and technical lead for the Design System team, I drove change to reinvent the team and ecosystem — decentralizing UI development for the product in the process.

Projects

Cloud Design System Team — practices & operating model

When I came on the team, it was consistently underwater. Work planning was largely an exercise in “largest fire,” with a number of efforts underway to stem the bleeding. As Technical Lead Manager, I rebuilt the practices and rituals of the cross-functional Design System teams into something that provided stability, value, and reasonable expectations rather than constant fire drills.

Made Cloud Design System part of the larger Material Design org; served as primary voice for Cloud.
Renegotiated expectations with feature teams and horizontals, making targeted technical changes to the operating model.
Advised, proposed, and planned larger technical frontend strategy with Director-level leadership.
Reprocessed our backlog, splitting it from an accumulating pile into a number of tracked queues and burndowns.
Triaged issues directly and provided accessibility support to feature teams alongside a11y horizontals.

Google Material Migration

Long considered infeasible without rewrite

As part of updating the Design System across the Console to the latest Google Material specifications, I proposed, advocated for, and then drove execution on an overhaul-level migration. Whereas previous attempts depended on brute force or manual migration, this strategy enabled the console to be updated with minimal changes to feature team code — something previously thought impractical.

Leading voice in Director-level conversations on need, capability, and next-steps.
Created and presented decks, demos, and Technical Design Documents to various org audiences.
Drove the larger effort, helping to plan technical needs from GraphQL infrastructure to app shell.
Supported migrating feature teams as primary engineering point of contact.