System direction • Product UX • Cross-functional alignment
Building the design system from scratch, I worked across product, engineering, legal, compliance and business to find the requirements and shape them into a design direction. I lead the development from the first components to strategic UX principles, all the way through to finished products.
Beyond this, the shared system of components, principles, patterns and visual rules gave teams a common foundation, allowing designers, engineers and non-designers to produce coherent work.
Micro
From components to company capability
Full UI design system. These same foundations now support:
Product, Websites, Presentation, Marketing, AI-assisted creation.
One language, shared across different teams and different kinds of work.
Macro
Not complex features
Not a financial system
A simple phone plan
Phone plan Account Management scales into something vast. Points, credits, tiers, USD, crypto. Payments, rewards, bonuses, auto top-ups. Dashboards, settings, payment management, International travel packages, multi country.
None of these features is the product. The product is a mobile plan that works as people expect. The design challenge was to keep the underlying depth available without making users experience its complexity.
Strategic user journey planning
Designing flows for optimal user experience within the constrains of business and technical requirements, while operating in a highly regulated field.
The possible combinations of products and account states run into the millions—more screens than any team could design or test individually.
The system therefore had to define how screens behave, not merely how they look. Shared rules determine what appears, what changes and which action is most relevant for each account state.
Design principles
Rules, not screens
Designing every possible account state individually would not scale.
Shared rules determine what appears, what changes and which action matters for each user—allowing the product to remain coherent as new plans, regions and services are introduced.
Design principle 1
Design for relationship, not transaction
The AMS gives every customer a persistent account foundation.
Plans can be reused, changed and extended, while future purchases build on what already exists. The result is an ongoing view of a customer’s connectivity rather than a record of separate transactions.
Design principle 2
Make the next decision clear
Account management is rarely a single linear journey.
The interface prioritises the most relevant action and progressively reveals secondary choices, helping users navigate complexity without having to understand the system behind it.
Hunters and prey
Our hunting instincts shape how we navigate the modern world.
Capability Created
Efficiency across teams
Less routine work returned to design.
Engineers could build from established components and patterns.
Non-designers could create screens, presentations and communications without starting from zero.
AI-assisted work could begin with brand and interface guardrails already in place.
Designers could spend more time on new, ambiguous and strategically important problems.
Reflection
The components were the most visible part of the work.
The independence they created was the more important outcome.