Zebra Technologies: Productizing a Design System
Zebra Technologies Design System: Productizing a Design System
Within my first year at Zebra Technologies, I was tasked by leadership to take ownership of our existing design system that was fragmented, under-resourced, and largely under-adopted by multiple engineering teams. I approached this task like a product, implementing a roadmap, governance processes, design reviews, quality assessments, and AI-driven tools to streamline repetitive tasks and reduce engineering costs.
Key outcomes from case study:
35% fewer broken components followed once we stabilized the foundation.
40% fewer redundant workflows came from integrating AI into daily design ops.
80% reduction in design backlog unlocked momentum across teams.
40% increase in component velocity helped teams ship faster with confidence.
60% faster icon production unified software and hardware workflows.
45+ applications reached WCAG AA compliance, raising the accessibility bar across the org.
1 unified ecosystem aligned fully to Zebra’s 2025 global rebrand.
Client
Zebra Technologies
Type
Product Design
Year
2025
Process & Solution
Role: Principal Product Designer / Staff
Location: Burlington, VT (Remote)
Duration: 13 months
Collaborations:
Led a team of 6 designers
Partnered with an external agency
Collaborated across 8 engineering teams plus global hardware, brand, and marketing stakeholders
Scope & Deliverables:
Owned the end-to-end design system roadmap and delivery
Integrated AI into design and operational workflows
Led component and icon pipelines across software and hardware
Built Figma templates to standardize and accelerate delivery
Ran weekly check-ins and critiques and quarterly roadmap reviews
Contributed hands-on design across core foundations
Created and managed a centralized SharePoint hub for governance and documentation
Reduced backlog and refreshed foundation files with new brand colors
Streamlined cross-department user flows
Produced executive alignment decks and leadership presentations
Understanding the Problem
When I began managing Zebra’s digital design system, I discovered a bloated, poorly documented, and fragmented system. Designers were unintentionally breaking components, engineers were reluctant to adopt the system, and each team maintained its own shadow library.
Key challenges:
Multiple shadow libraries across development teams.
Frequent component breakage by designers, undermining trust in the system.
Documentation that was scattered, outdated, or missing entirely.
These issues led to duplication, slower delivery, and inconsistent user experiences, just as the company was preparing for a major global rebrand.
Goal: To create a scalable, enterprise-wide design system that standardized UX patterns, accelerated product development, and reduced engineering costs across Zebra’s global product ecosystem.
Strategic Approach
Stabilize the Design System Foundation
To establish a baseline and address the fragmentation of the design system, I began by stabilizing the foundation through several key steps:
Audited each component with the engineering team.
Reviewed naming conventions, typography, and color variants.
Analyzed which Figma projects and designers were actively using the system components.
All findings were compiled and documented, highlighting where design and code had diverged, identifying workflow inefficiencies, and uncovering opportunities for the department to better support both designers and engineers.
Our goal was to eliminate redundancies, implement a scalable naming convention to support engineering, and rebuild a system without collapsing under complexity.
Closing the Design-to-Code Gap & Reducing Cost
By connecting Figma tokens directly to Storybook and introducing engineering reviews before component merges, we moved from a traditional handoff model to true co-ownership. Design and engineering began building the system collaboratively, improving alignment, reducing rework, increasing credibility, and lowering long-term development costs.
Reducing Component Breakage
One of the top challenges leadership asked me to address was encouraging designers to stop breaking components and instead fully adopt the design system. The goal was to improve alignment across solutions, streamline the visual language, and promote component reuse, ensuring design, development, and product teams weren’t recreating the wheel.
To address this, I partnered closely with engineering and designers to understand and refine the existing workflow for requesting new and updating existing components. While the process had been streamlined, designers still perceived component creation as cumbersome, especially under tight timelines. After evaluating Figma’s capabilities, I proposed introducing branching into the workflow. Branching allowed designers to safely iterate on components in isolation without compromising core system assets.
Designers could now create or update components within a branch, iterate freely, and then review changes with engineering and I to ensure quality and consistency upon pushing live. Once aligned, components were merged and pushed to production, often within 48 hours.
Process Implementation & Adoption
To ensure successful adoption, I led team and individual design sessions to upskill designers on advanced Figma techniques, maintaining consistency across varying skill levels. Weekly design critiques established a shared feedback loop that reinforced standards, increased trust in the design system, and strengthened my credibility across the organization.
Icon creation
Another major challenge was icon creation, impacting roughly 75% of development teams across both hardware and software. I led efforts to ensure consistency across physical devices and digital products. This significant initiative succeeded by leveraging our newly established component governance and creation workflows, including an automated approach using Figma and Flutter to implement the icon library.
The result was a measurable shift in behavior across designers, industrial teams, and engineers. Teams began trusting and using the icon library as intended, boosting consistency, accelerating delivery, and increasing cross-team confidence.
Centralize Communication and System Visibility
To address the fragmented documentation challenges, I established a centralized hub to ensure designers and engineers had access to the most current and credible information. I made the strategic decision to consolidate all design system documentation within SharePoint, creating a single source of truth for usage guidelines, component specifications, accessibility standards, and supporting resources e.g. downloadable fonts and templates.
To drive adoption and awareness of ongoing updates, I partnered with leadership to develop a communication strategy for the cross-functional teams that regularly relied on the Zeta design system. This included monthly update communications to product managers and engineers highlighting key changes, as well as a dedicated blog for designers that provided deeper insights, contextual updates, and early visibility into changes that could impact their workflows.
Outcomes
Final Solution
Zeta evolved into a unified, productized design system, and an operational driver for the entire organization.
40% faster design and development cycles for common workflows.
60% increase in icon creation velocity across software and hardware.
35% higher component contribution rates from design teams.
45+ applications fully WCAG AA compliant, improving usability and reducing risk.
Engineering adoption increased from 40% to 60%, cutting rework and UI defects.
Zeta evolved into a productized design system and a true operational engine. Design, engineering, and brand now work from one scalable foundation, accelerating quality, speed, and consistency across Zebra’s entire ecosystem.
Reflection
This wasn’t about cleaning up a library, it was about shifting from maintenance to momentum.
By treating the design system as a living product, aligning human insight with system-level scale, and proving measurable ROI, we elevated design from a support function to a strategic enabler. The work showed that strong Design Ops doesn’t just make things look better, it helps organizations move faster, smarter, and together.
