The Business Behind a Design System

As Qik grew, more teams were building more experiences in parallel. That growth brought opportunity, but it also made something increasingly difficult to ignore: we were spending time solving problems that had already been solved elsewhere in the organization.

The same component could exist several times in code under different names. Styles were implemented locally by individual teams. Something that looked consistent in Figma could become fragmented by the time it reached the app.

These were small decisions with a growing cost. Every duplicate needed to be built, reviewed, maintained, and eventually updated.

Cobalt, Qik’s Design Language System, gave us a way to address that problem together. But making it work required more than building a library. We needed to make it a business priority.

Giving the vision room to grow

My UI lead deserves the credit for leading the design system itself. The expertise, care, and persistence behind Cobalt’s foundations were central to what it became.

My responsibility was to turn that vision into an organizational commitment. I brought my experience into the direction of the system, built the business case, and worked to secure the people and support needed to move it forward.

Consistency mattered to us, but it was not enough to justify the investment on its own. We had product commitments to meet, limited capacity, and teams with competing priorities. We needed to explain what fragmentation was costing the business.

Repeated components meant repeated development effort. Local styles made updates harder to coordinate. Differences between design and code created additional corrections and maintenance.

I presented our CEO with a phased work plan supported by internal tests. The proposal connected the system to those practical problems and gave us a way to demonstrate progress before asking for a larger commitment.

We secured a dedicated frontend developer to begin the work. That was an important turning point: Cobalt now had engineering capacity committed to its implementation, alongside the design expertise shaping it.

How Cobalt is built

Cobalt brings together several connected layers.

Design tokens establish shared visual foundations such as color and typography. Core components turn those foundations into reusable interface elements. Patterns and templates support recurring experiences, while documentation explains how to use the system and changelogs help teams follow its evolution.

The Core Library supports work across accounts, payments, lending, investments, and engagement. That reach gives individual improvements a broader purpose. A solution developed for one need can become something several teams build on.

We wanted Cobalt to be useful to people with different kinds of expertise. Designers and developers need detailed specifications and reliable building blocks. Teams outside product development need clear guidance and templates they can apply confidently without understanding the underlying architecture.

The structure continues to evolve through implementation. We use the questions and difficulties teams encounter to identify where the system needs clearer guidance, more flexibility, or simpler ways to maintain it.

The aim is to give people greater independence while keeping their work connected to shared foundations.

Making Cobalt a shared business priority

Bringing frontend into the initiative changed the conversations we could have.

Together, we examined where shared components made sense, where a product needed something specific, and how design and development could recognize the same elements across their tools.

Our audits made the problem tangible. Switch and toast components each had four implementations. These were examples from our own app that helped us discuss repeated effort and maintenance in concrete terms.

We also had to respect the differences between disciplines. A flexible component in Figma might need a different structure in code because of its behavior, data, or context. Building a shared language meant working through those differences together.

My role was to connect that collaboration to priorities and resources, so the work could become part of delivery rather than something teams fitted around it.

What began with one dedicated frontend developer grew into a dedicated Cobalt team spanning design, frontend, and production. Weekly sessions now bring the team together around the roadmap, advances, and progress.

That gave the system an ongoing home and a shared responsibility for moving it forward.

Connecting product delivery with the system

Qik Pro became the starting point for Cobalt’s implementation.

It gave the team a real product context in which to apply the foundations. One of the initial changes was migrating local app styles to design system styles, addressing the fragmentation that had developed as teams implemented visual decisions independently.

For me, Qik Pro connected two priorities that could otherwise compete for attention: delivering the next product experience and investing in how future experiences would be built.

Product delivery gave Cobalt a place to prove its usefulness. Cobalt gave that work foundations that could extend to other products.

The implementation also helped us understand what needed to evolve. Findings from delivery, audits, and roundtables fed back into the system, connecting the people using Cobalt with the decisions shaping its next steps.

Earning support through results

We approached implementation in phases so we could learn, measure progress, and make the case for continued investment.

Our internal measurements showed a 12% improvement in combined design and development efficiency after the tokens phase. After adding components and templates, that improvement reached 27%.

Those results mattered because they moved the conversation beyond visual consistency. We could demonstrate that shared foundations were improving how teams worked.

For me, they also changed the quality of the conversation with leadership. I could return with evidence of what the investment was producing and use that evidence to support the next phase.

Cobalt did not receive all its resources at once. We earned support through results, expanded the commitment, and continued building. The dedicated multidisciplinary team we have today grew out of that progression.

Growing beyond the app

Cobalt began with the needs of the Qik app, but its foundations started to become useful elsewhere in the business.

We began adapting the system for the web. Marketing also started using it for emails and social media posts, while Human Resources brought it into internal communications.

Each context had different needs. A product interface, a marketing email, and an internal announcement serve different purposes. Expanding Cobalt meant carrying a recognizable visual language across them while giving teams room to adapt it to their work.

For me, this was an important sign of adoption. Teams outside design and engineering were finding practical value in something that had started with product delivery.

Cobalt was becoming a resource for how Qik builds products, presents itself to customers, and communicates with its own people.

Preparing for new ways of building

We also began preparing Cobalt for use by AI agents.

Clear component names, consistent properties, and documentation about when and how to use each element give these tools context for understanding the system. We approached this as an extension of the alignment between Figma and code, beginning to explore it through agents, skills, and plugins.

The aim is to help AI assisted workflows use the same foundations and conventions our teams rely on. This work is still developing.

Alongside it, we continue strengthening accessibility, quality, and implementation support. These remain areas of ongoing work, with Cobalt giving us a shared place to address them as the system grows.

What I am most proud of

Cobalt became an important milestone in how the company understood our team’s contribution.

It was part of the reasoning behind the evolution of our team and my role from Design to Innovation and Product Experience. We were taking responsibility for resources beyond design, bringing efficiency measures into business conversations, and helping prepare Qik for improvements in accessibility, quality, and AI integration.

That change meant more to me than a new title. It reflected a broader accountability for how the company builds and improves its products.

I am proud of the system our team created, and of the expertise my UI lead brought to it. I am equally proud that we created the conditions for that work to grow: a business case leadership could support, engineering capacity to implement it, and a dedicated team to carry it forward.

Cobalt began as a response to fragmented design and development. It helped us earn a broader role in shaping how Qik works.

Efficiency figures reflect internal measurements across design and development during the implementation phases described. Detailed measurement data and selected internal materials are omitted for confidentiality. I would be happy to discuss the approach and business impact within the limits of what I can share.