Wheels Unified Design System

Challenge

Following the merger of Wheels, Donlen, and LeasePlan USA, product teams were shipping through three competing UI models with no system governance, no shared contribution rules, and no reliable design-to-code parity. The risk was organizational: inconsistent experiences, slower delivery, accessibility gaps, and repeated implementation decisions across teams. The business needed a system-level operating model that could align product, engineering, marketing, and agency partners while still supporting product-specific needs.

My Role

• Design System Governor: Owned system integrity, boundaries, and evolution across design, engineering, marketing, and external agency partners
• Governance Model Author: Defined where flexibility was allowed and where it was not, and held that line through principled, documented design rationale
• Bridge between design and engineering: Ensured 1:1 parity between Figma, ThemeBuilder, and Storybook across KendoReact and React Native Paper
• Documentation Lead: Translated system intent into usage principles, decision frameworks, and contribution guidelines teams could follow independently
• Mentor and culture builder: Guided designers through Figma migration and system adoption, raising UX maturity across the organization

Approach

• Migrated all designers to Figma and established contribution models for scalable growth
• Created Design System 1.0: Flexible Figma foundation to guide future implementations
• Built KendoReact System: 60+ components with feature-rich data grid, ensuring parity across Figma, ThemeBuilder, and Storybook
• Adapted React Native Paper System: Mobile-first design aligned with WCAG accessibility standards
• Developed centralized asset libraries: Icon and vehicle image libraries for consistency
• Documented comprehensive guidelines in Frontify with clear governance models

System architecture showing unified approach across frameworks

Impact

• Replaced fragmented legacy UI practices with a single enterprise design system spanning three merged organizations and multiple product surfaces
• Reduced implementation time by 50% by standardizing reusable component patterns, documentation, and decision frameworks engineering teams could apply directly
• Established system governance (boundaries, contribution workflow, and review criteria) that reduced off-system variance across product, marketing, and external agencies
• Embedded accessibility as a system property, reaching WCAG AA standards across core components instead of treating compliance as a late-stage project task
• Improved delivery predictability by creating parity across Figma, ThemeBuilder, and Storybook, lowering design-dev churn and post-release UI defects
• Raised cross-org UX maturity by giving teams a shared language for component decisions, scaling influence beyond any single squad

ThemeBuilder implementation ensuring design-development parity

Frontify documentation serving as single source of truth across teams

Tools & Technologies

Figma · KendoReact · React Native Paper · Kendo ThemeBuilder · Storybook · Frontify

Links