Design Systems · 2U
Scaling design systems across 90+ partner brands
When 2U consolidated four business lines, nothing connected brand, marketing, and product design. I built 2U’s first Design Systems function to fix that: the system itself, plus the team, process, and culture to sustain it.
Role
Senior Design Systems Manager
Company
2U / edX
Scope
90+ partner brands, 4 business lines
Focus
Systems, team building, Figma migration
Results
25%
improvement in design efficiency
30%
faster project turnaround
30%
less time spent in QA
Governance
How the system keeps evolving
A simplified view of the contribution model: enablement over enforcement.
01
Designer spots a need
02
Raised in Slack or review
03
Systems team evaluates
04
Built and documented
05
Published to the library
↺
Feedback from teams using the library starts the next round.
One system, many brands
One template, five partner themes
Illustrative: the same components and layout, re-themed entirely through brand tokens.
Partner A
Partner B
Partner C
Partner D
Partner E
The problem
Talent wasn’t the issue. Fragmentation was.
Design resources were scattered and workflows varied by business line. As the organization grew, those gaps slowed delivery, strained teams, and limited creative impact.
Designers worked in silos across business lines
Brand consistency was hard to hold at scale
Design and development workflows were loosely aligned
New designers ramped slowly without shared foundations
Teams spent too much time recreating work instead of improving it
My role
Founding a function, not just a library.
My focus was not only what we built, but how teams would use, evolve, and trust the system over time.
Founded and scaled 2U’s first Design Systems team, setting its mission, scope, and roadmap
Partnered with senior leadership to position systems as a growth lever, not just an efficiency play
Shaped career paths for designers moving into systems-focused roles
Led the organization-wide move from Adobe XD to Figma, paired with a structured adoption plan
What we built
Shared foundations, with room for each brand.
We started with an audit across brands and teams to see where patterns aligned, and where they diverged for good reason.
A multi-brand system supporting shared foundations and partner-specific expression
White-labeled templates so partner updates ship faster without losing brand integrity
Components aligned with development needs to cut design-to-engineering friction
Governance and contribution models so the system keeps evolving sustainably
How the system is structured
Shared foundations, partner-specific expression
Every partner brand maps onto the same token names, so one component library and one set of templates serve them all.
01
Foundations
color
type
space
Color, type, and spacing tokens shared by every brand
02
Partner themes
Each partner’s brand mapped onto the same token names
03
Components
One library built on themed tokens, aligned with dev
04
Templates
White-labeled pages and campaigns, ready for any partner
Adoption
Enablement over enforcement.
Adoption was designed in from day one, so designers felt ownership rather than obligation.
A 12-week Figma training program for 15 designers
Ongoing documentation and enablement resources
A dedicated Slack channel for support, feedback, and iteration
Adoption
From Adobe XD to Figma, one team at a time
A 12-week program for 15 designers, paired with documentation and a dedicated support channel.
Start
Adobe XD
Siloed files across business lines
12 weeks
Structured training
15 designers, hands-on in Figma
Foundations
Shared libraries
Tokens, components, and templates
Support
Docs + Slack
Enablement resources and a help channel
Outcome
Teams adopt
~30% faster design velocity
Results
A shared organizational asset.
Beyond the efficiency gains, design systems became a shared asset instead of a niche function. A dedicated team now partners with UX, web development, and design leads to keep evolving templates, patterns, and workflows.
What it shows
How I lead at scale.
Systems as leverage, not control
People-first enablement, not rigid process
Craft and critique, even at scale
Long-term thinking beyond individual launches