A design system four products actually share

Every Calmlabs product had grown its own component set — similar buttons that behaved differently, five shades of the same green, and QA bugs that came from the gaps between them. Designers re-drew the same components for every project and engineers re-implemented them.

I audited all four products, built a token taxonomy from the overlaps (color, spacing, type, motion), and led the migration to a shared component library with documented usage, accessibility baked in, and a contribution model teams actually follow. Adoption was phased product by product, never a big-bang rewrite.

All four products run on the shared system. New feature UI time dropped noticeably, visual QA cycles shortened, and the library now absorbs brand changes in hours instead of sprints.