One design system through a merger
Three brands, more than ten design systems and 50+ squads, rebuilt into one system in production.
When Virgin Media and O2 merged, the combined digital estate had more than ten design systems, four overlapping design tools, no shared governance, and accessibility handled as a late review step, while three brand identities (Virgin Media, O2 and the O2 Priority loyalty product) had to keep shipping across web and app, built by 50+ agile squads.
Foundations before components
I led the rebuild into a single design system in production across all three brands. It started with an operating model (a cross-discipline Creative Guild and five agreed design principles) before any components; a tool consolidation to Figma that cut licence cost per person by roughly 90%; and a two-layer token architecture, primitive to semantic, so components stayed brand-agnostic and each brand became a theme flip.
- brands from one component set
- 3
- A/B tests enabled
- 400+
Governance designed to survive scale
A component triage flow into a "Design Factory" (prototype, validate with user testing or A/B, guild sign-off covering accessibility and responsiveness, then tokenise and document), canary releases into GitLab and Storybook, and documentation treating design, description and code as one artefact. Accessibility became a system property: a contrast grid across every colour pairing, a guild, bootcamps and a group-level accessibility working group. I defined the motion foundation personally.
Automation and measurement
Two pieces I'm proudest of. First, a pipeline where a designer changing a token in Figma automatically translated design language to code and pushed it to every squad's development environment, years before AI tooling made that commonplace. Second, component analytics that evolved from monthly usage counts to daily per-squad insert and detach data, so system health was a dashboard, not a debate.
Outcome
One system, set up, tested and embedded across the teams in around four months, in production serving 650+ designers and engineers across 50+ squads, and an architecture that absorbed brand contexts that didn't exist when it was designed.