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Aligning design and engineering around a shared product language.
Shared terminology, contribution principles and governance helped design and engineering evolve a reusable foundation across several product contexts.
- My role
- Lead Product Designer
- Industry
- Education technology
- Focus
- Design systems, Design and engineering
- Scope
- Consumer, business and internal products
The short version
The case in three moves.
- Challenge
- Design and engineering needed a clearer shared language and contribution model for reusable product foundations.
- Leadership
- I helped the disciplines align terminology, principles and ownership around a common system.
- Outcome
- Teams gained a clearer route for reusing and evolving components across several product contexts.
01 / Problem
The component gap was really a collaboration gap.
Designers duplicated work and rebuilt components from inconsistent sources. Engineers navigated libraries that had grown without a shared structure, while live components, design components and the language used to describe them did not always match.
The result was slower delivery, avoidable confusion between disciplines and an experience that could feel disconnected across product areas.
02 / Evidence
Show the cost across the delivery system.
I made the product inconsistencies visible and connected them to available funnel evidence and known qualitative pain points. Cross-discipline retrospectives surfaced engineering concerns such as duplicate code, terminology mismatches and collaboration happening too late.
That evidence created a stronger case than visual inconsistency alone. A shared system could improve both the learner experience and the economics of delivery.
03 / Governance
Create shared ownership at every level.
Working with engineering representatives from each platform, I designed a contribution and review process that fitted normal product delivery. Representatives became system captains, meeting regularly and sharing decisions with their disciplines.
Clear responsibilities, a shared communication channel and aligned naming created the common language needed before deeper component guidance could work.
04 / Foundation
Build for today while making the debt visible.
I created a foundation library based on live components, a simple status model for confidence and completeness, a backlog for missing guidance and a roadmap for the components teams expected to need next.
The system became part of normal product work. Consistency improved across consumer, business and internal experiences, people could move between teams with less disruption and greater reuse supported faster collaboration between design and engineering.