A system built
across years,
not sprints.

It started as maintenance. The Groups page in ChMS used old styles that predated Prism — Pushpay's design system. The brief: rebuild it like-for-like on Prism 1.0, alongside the US UX Manager. No new features.

The board approved it with a condition: consistent, but not modern enough for where the product needed to go. They wanted a modernised UI alongside the consolidation.

I had one week. I focused on the foundation — border radius, elevation, typography, iconography — changes that cascade through everything built on top. The board accepted it.

From that point I owned Staq Modernisation: setting priorities, delegating, and working with engineering to close the gap between design intent and built output.

The system didn't transform overnight. It evolved across years — each phase driven by new technology or a shift in business direction.

Buttons are the clearest example. Before the variable architecture, every product needed its own variants — default, hover, active — across each product colour. That's 30+ variants to maintain. A change to one product's button required manual updates across every other.

With Figma Variables and semantic token collections, 13 button components use modes to swap colour and state. Change the mode, change the product. No duplicate components. No manual maintenance.

The same pattern, scaled up: product templates. Where every product had its own four screen artboards — 16 templates total across four products — the variable architecture collapsed them into one Product Template that changes its look, size, and feel based on which mode is active.

As Design System Lead, the work has shifted from building the system to governing it — setting priorities, defining component health, and keeping Figma and Storybook aligned as both evolve.

I act as the bridge between Product, UX, and engineering. No component exists twice. Everything is tracked in Jira using an atomic design structure I built — so the team can see state, dependencies, and blockers at a glance.

The long-term direction for Pushpay is a single unified SaaS — all products under one roof, no distinction between what was historically separate. The design system needs to be ready for that.

That's what the current work is really about. The Jira structure, atom audits, Storybook parity, AI tooling — infrastructure for a future state where a component built today works across every product without modification.

We're not there yet. The system still has to support separate products while that future is built. But every decision now is made with that north star in mind.