Zebra Design System

Role

Deliverables: Roadmap planning, new and revised component and icon creation, templates, weekly and quarterly check-ins, hands-on design work, create and maintain the SharePoint portal, reduce backlog, updating the foundation file with new brand colors, defining user flows, and preparing alignment decks.

Location: Based in Burlington, Vermont, working remotely while managing 6 designers and collaborating with an agency, 8 engineering teams, and global hardware, brand, and marketing teams at Zebra Technologies.

Duration: 13 months

Overview

As Design System Manager, I inherited a system with uneven adoption and inconsistent standards, and transformed it into a unified foundation supporting over 20 flagship applications within 12 months. By aligning Zeta with Zebra’s refreshed brand and bridging marketing, software, and hardware experiences, I expanded system visibility, strengthened cross-department alignment, reduced UI defects, and improved accessibility across 45+ applications. Adoption rose to 60% of product teams, with measurable gains in speed, quality, and consistency.

Problem & Goals

Constrained by legacy silos, overlapping libraries, and inconsistent implementation between design and development. These gaps drove duplicated work, slower delivery, and noticeable visual and interaction inconsistencies across products.

Key goals set and delivered on:

• Establish a shared, scalable visual language aligned with the new 2025 Zebra brand.

  
  

• Centralize and streamline UI patterns, design principles and reusable components.

  
  

• Increase adoption of the design system.

  
  

• Enable cross-functional teams to ship faster and more consistently leveraging AI, targeting around a 40% reduction in design and build time for common flows.

Research & Insights

Partnering with a dedicated UX researcher, I mapped the full ecosystem of design system users: designers, front-end engineers, brand and marketing teams, external agencies, product owners, and senior stakeholders. Together, we identified friction points in onboarding, documentation, and cross-team collaboration, as well as legacy habits slowing adoption.

These insights informed a phased roadmap focused on early impact: rapid delivery of high-demand components and icons, improved documentation clarity, and long-term targets for adoption, component coverage, and stakeholder satisfaction.

Our research revealed two core user groups:

Developers

• Goals: Implement designs quickly and reliably, with confidence in accessibility, performance, and currency.

  
  

• Needs: Clear guidelines, plug-and-play code snippets, standardized tokens and CSS, and predictable versioning.

  
  

• Pain points: Inconsistent design-code parity, missing edge cases, limited customization guidance, accessibility gaps, and steep onboarding learning curves.

Designers

• Goals: Move efficiently from concept to spec while maintaining brand and interaction consistency across products.

  
  

• Needs: Up-to-date libraries, clear do/don’t guidance, tokenized styles, and transparent communication with developers.

  
  

• Pain points: Outdated or duplicated components, poor discoverability, fragmented patterns, and unclear update cycles.

Ideation & System Architecture

Through this foundation, I tackled several systemic challenges:

• Localized components: Teams were creating custom variants to move faster, leading to fragmentation and rework. I improved the component creation and approval process to encourage contribution while reducing duplication.

  
  

• Icon and asset proliferation: Teams were manually building icons across hardware and software pipelines, leading to inconsistent visuals. I centralized icon production, applied AI automation, and standardized templates across Figma and JIRA.

  
  

• Manual workflows: Designers and engineers were repeating low-value tasks like token setup and redlines. I integrated Figma automation, enabling faster, more accurate delivery.

Key initiatives included:

• Component creation model & governance: I established weekly cross-functional sessions to unify developers and designers around shared patterns, clear contribution guidelines, and branch-based component reviews before merge. This improved consistency and engagement.

  
  

• Centralized icon pipeline: By automating icon generation, standardizing naming conventions, and aligning Figma-to-JIRA workflows, I eliminated redundant work and ensured cohesive visual language across software and hardware.

  
  

• Automation & tooling: Implemented design tokens, component variants, and a stakeholder portal that cut onboarding time and simplified resource access. I also introduced a “Get Started” Figma kit to help junior designers ramp up faster.

  
  

• Brand integration: Developed a scalable visual system to support evolving brand updates across enterprise applications — expanding colors, typography, and corner radii through low-friction updates supported by clear documentation.