I led the team that gave IBM designers their design foundation.
IBM's move from Sketch to Figma left Carbon for IBM Products without a kit. I led a team of 10 to build it from scratch — 30+ components, no prior Figma experience on my part, two major platform transitions, and 165% adoption growth in five months.
Platform-level delivery under pressure — leading a team, making the right trade-offs, shipping something the whole organisation could rely on, and tracking adoption as the measure of success.
The story
The challenge
IBM's move from Sketch to Figma meant Carbon for IBM Products needed a complete Figma kit — fast. Without one, design delivery would halt for thousands of designers. There was no kit and no team assigned to build one. I pulled together a team of 10 product designers — none of them design systems specialists, all volunteering time alongside their day jobs. Quality and speed were both non-negotiable.
Carbon 11 — the next major version of the design system — was already underway as we built. We needed kits for both versions to support teams transitioning at different times.
How we built it
The foundation wasn't just the components — it was the token layer underneath them. We mapped every component to Carbon's design token architecture using Figma variables, so colour and typography were driven by tokens rather than hardcoded values. That kept design and code in sync, enabled theme switching, and made the kit fast to evolve as the system changed.
Leading meant balancing empathy with rigour. I matched complexity to capability, reviewed every submission, and redistributed components when product deadlines pulled people away rather than let quality slip.
The result
Launched in July 2022, the kit reached 12,848 weekly component inserts by December — a 165% growth in usage over five months. Designers across IBM Software had a trusted Figma foundation from day one of the migration. The library has evolved since, but is still used daily by product teams.
What surprised me most was the team. A group of strangers spread across the world became people who could genuinely depend on each other. It was the project that built my love of design systems.
