A conversation reflecting on four years of design system work. Unifying thousands of interfaces into one cohesive language.
interview
Can you introduce us to the design system project you were brought in to work on at bp?
Well, just some background first: it was a great time to join bp, which was really starting to champion human experience design – with a big focus on sustainability. The Global Head of Design was passionate about increasing the organisation’s design maturity and had hired some top talent. That meant there was this highly supportive and enthusiastic community of designers working on some really forward-thinking projects.
Timeline
2021 — 2025
Team size
15+
My role
Lead Product Designer, Design Systems
How advanced was the design system when you joined?
You had a lot of freedom then?
That's right. I was working through the libraries and then meeting the DE chief twice a week to chart my progress. As a veteran of both design and development, he had extremely high standards, but was very happy with my work – and his confidence gave me that freedom.
I’d come to bp from a company that did not give people that kind of autonomy, so it was really refreshing to work at a place where someone trusted me enough to deliver. But because it was a very small team and the libraries were very large, it took time and a lot of perseverance.
Yes, but I loved getting my teeth into it. There was so much to do: by the time we were done, buttons, as an example, had three colour themes, five shapes, five sizes, various icon configurations, plus fixed-width and floating variants. If you think that each of those also needs to come in five interaction states and in both light and dark mode, you can start to understand the scale of it – and that’s just one component.
Guv Biring • Senior prodct Designer • bp / Bros&Co
What was the thing that you found hardest to kind of wrap your head around at the start of the project?
It was probably the politics and the scale of the company. I hadn’t been involved in working for such a large organisation before. But our team leader realised that very early on and he shielded us from all of the politics, so we could just do the work. That helped a lot.
Did the design system team grow?
Yes, about a year and a half into the project, we got some proper funding. At its peak, we must have had six product designers, four developers and three content designers – a big difference from when I started in a team of three. By that time, our design system was really broad – especially considering it was built mostly by me!
Because of my work on the project so far, I was promoted to a lead role. That was a proud moment, but what was very important for me was that I continued to do hands-on work. But my new position meant I was allowed to have more ownership over what the team was working on.
Tell us about the Post-it notes…
How did you find your new leadership role?
It was a little challenging to begin with, because it was my first time leading a team, but I quickly grew into it. I loved working out which team members would be best at which tasks, which meant I was able to be properly strategic in my planning. How different people work and how to communicate effectively with them was a bit like building a design library - but with human beings! When I realised that, planning the bigger picture became much easier.
Later down the line, the team told me they appreciated that I was always there for them. I wasn’t one of those managers that just sits in the managing chair and tells the team what to do. When I needed to, I was jumping in next to them and doing the job with them. That's the thing I’m genuinely proudest about during my time leading that team.
And did you learn from the people you worked with – particularly from different disciplines?
Absolutely. Being in meetings with developers, getting to listen to their conversations and gaining an understanding of their work – well, that allowed me to understand the bigger picture of what they were doing. It also helped me understand what product design means for them. And I didn't really have to go searching for that knowledge; I just naturally absorbed it from working alongside them.
Working closely with content designers on the documentation opened up a whole different side of the design system work too. They were designing documentation and we had some great meetings where they would dig into the detail behind individual components. With my background on the project, I was able to offer them insights on the context of a lot of the work as well as provide visual examples of interfaces to show users elements of the design system in different scenarios.
Can you think of any ‘eureka!’ moments you had during the project, where things just fell into place?
A eureka moment for me was coming to the understanding that it’s the way that I think that makes me great at design systems. Because I can plan very well, I’m really good at managing and simplifying complex systems.
For me, planning out the libraries involved 5 to 10 minutes of thinking, and then I was able to jump straight into it.
While designing the smallest elements, I was able to understand how the whole library was going to turn out and have that vision in my head. I never saw a difficulty in the scale of the project, but another designer might have found it overwhelming.
What was the best part of the project?
Migrating the whole design system from Sketch to Figma. This happened a few years into the project, when the team was quite large, but it was like the early days again - I got to go back to being part of a small team, with lots of freedom.
I worked with a fellow product designer who I got on really well with and, after a long stretch of remote working, we had the chance to meet in London for coffee and a chat.
bpCore is one of the biggest design systems in the world and the two of us manually migrated the entire thing from Sketch to Figma and optimised it.
It was a huge accomplishment, not least because the two of us did it almost single-handedly. The result was a really user-friendly, fully-functional design system.
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