Design @ Posh.AI
Building a scalable design system from the ground up
Our main aim was to create a design language that’s easy to use and can be easily shared with everyone—not just future designers, but also engineers, producers, marketers, and sales teams.
As the founding designer at Posh, I faced the challenge of working with minimal resources when it came to designing within the existing "brand ecosystem."
The marketing team utilized Google Docs and a rasterized logo to create designs, while the engineering team relied on two front-end engineers to act as designers, resulting in design elements existing solely within the code.
This situation presented an opportunity for improvement, something I leveraged to assist Posh in developing a comprehensive brand identity and implementing it as a robust design system.
Challenges
Design Advocacy: The biggest challenge was figuring out how to effectively advocate for design at different levels. I realized that when not everyone is on board with a new idea, you need more than just the work to make it happen meaning I had to learn to advocate not only for the user but for our greater design system as a whole.
Being an Individual Contributor vs Strategic Partner: As a founding designer, there’s a delicate balance between being a hands-on contributor creating mockups quickly and a design operations expert when championing a non-existent team. The effort really paid off in the first three months, and I managed to bring on a front-end engineer and a design intern to help make the design vision a reality. It truly takes a village!
Building a Flexible Foundation: In my first few months at Posh, I focused on creating communication tools, documentation, briefs, and a Trello-based design ticketing system to avoid adding to the design debt I inherited. By the time I left, I had successfully established a weekly product review and basic brand guidelines for the team, along with a substantial collection of documents including creative briefs, email templates, one-pagers, customer journeys, and detailed customer interview guides.
The key to success here was understanding our team’s needs and product nuances. Our founders were attached to their brand, but it lacked cohesion and scalability. The project and team required a specific touch, relying on ensuring everyone felt heard, seen, and understood.
Design Forums
To ensure our small but strong team of 25 was aligned, I organized weekly Design Forums. These forums kept everyone informed about the design systems foundation I was developing for our brand and the organization. Initially, I hosted them to align everyone on our new brand identity and its application across the product. Eventually, PMs and engineers collaborated on design within their areas and how to better work together to build the Posh brand. This led to teams presenting at Design Forum, which eventually became our company Product Review.
Building the Brand in Stages
Since I was actively advocating for the future of design at Posh, I didn’t want to overwhelm users (or the larger Posh team) with a new design language too quickly. To help ease the transition, I implemented a phased “Crawl > Walk > Run” approach and gradually introducing an updated design language using the Atomic Design System to guide the rollout of new elements.
Role Head of Design
Cross-Functional Partners Engineering, Business Development
Success Metrics percent% success improvement, KPI implementation
All work shown here done by me.
