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Design Systems Ambassador at Salesforce

During my time at Salesforce, I had extensive exposure and interaction with Salesforce’s Lightning Design System, one of the most robust and mature design systems in the world. This design system supports over 200 internal designers as well as an external community of Salesforce developer partners.

I served as the lead Design System Ambassador for Salesforce’s largest product design team, Sales Cloud User Experience. The focus of this role was to help and enable the design team, as well as our Product and Engineering partners, to effectively work with the design system.

Design System Benefits

Establishing a design system within an organization is an undertaking and something that requires ongoing attention, but it can have many benefits to design and development teams. Design systems:

  • Enable design scalability across a product or products
  • Accelerate product development
  • Align design and development teams
  • Reduce one-offs in both design and code
  • Allow designers to focus on the differentiating factors of a user experience

Design System Ambassador Goal

At Salesforce, my focus was to enable designers to use the design system most effectively. Secondarily, I helped our Product and Engineering partners understand how the design system impacts them.

The creation and maintenance of a design system is only part of making design systems successful. Especially when working with a design system that needs to operate at the scale of the Salesforce Lightning Design System, the people operations side of design systems becomes increasingly complex and a critical focus area.

 

“Design systems are 10% code, 10% design, and 80% people ops.”

– Una Kravets at An Event Apart


Challenges the Ambassador Program Addresses

The Ambassador program was born out of an observation that Salesforce’s design system was facing several key challenges:

  • Support for the system was centralized with a design systems team, and not scaling well along with the growth of the organization
  • Designers often incorrectly implemented its patterns and components within their designs
  • Designers were unsure how to effectively contribute to and evolve the system
  • Designers had many questions throughout their process, and it took significant time to get those questions answered
  • It was difficult for designers to keep up with the changes and evolution of the system

Approach

As a Design Systems Ambassador, I was responsible for:

Program Definition:

  • Working with the Design Systems team to define and establish the program so that it could scale across the organization
  • Identifying opportunities to improve education and enablement programs for designers

Team Collaboration:

  • Improving communication and collaboration between the product design and design system teams
  • Working with Engineering to understand the usage and tradeoffs of the design system compared to custom implementations
  • Working with Product to help identify milestones required to effectively leverage the system and improving overall education of its benefits to the experience

Support and Guidance:

  • Advocating for the design system during design reviews
  • Coaching designers on the system’s usage and implementation
  • Leading onboarding and knowledge sharing for new designers

Impact

The Ambassador program had many immediate impacts across the organization.

Faster innovation: By better enabling designers to work within the system, we iterated and innovated more quickly.

Faster implementation: The design system enabled faster development and scalability in code. Improving education of the system enabled us to adopt it more consistently across the product.

Improved experiences: One of the main benefits of leveraging a design system is that designers can focus on the truly differentiating aspects of a user experience, as opposed to spending time designing its individual components or elements. By improving design system support and adoption, Salesforce’s designers became empowered to focus their attention on how to make their users more efficient and productive.