Senior Product Designer
Tracker SA
Cross-functional teams across product, engineering, and business
As the Product Design team matured, the need for a documented and repeatable QA process became increasingly important. Design reviews, accessibility checks, design system validation, and implementation QA were being conducted inconsistently across teams. Without a shared process, designers approached quality assurance differently, resulting in varying levels of design quality and implementation accuracy. The team needed a scalable framework that could be adopted across multiple products and designers while ensuring alignment with product, engineering, and business stakeholders.
The primary objectives of the project were to: Define a clear and repeatable QA process for the Product Design team. Establish quality checkpoints throughout the design lifecycle. Reduce design inconsistencies and implementation defects. Improve collaboration between Product Design and Engineering. Increase confidence in design handovers and releases. Create visibility into ownership, responsibilities, and review stages.
The project resulted in a comprehensive QA process map that documented: QA activities across each design phase. Roles and responsibilities. Quality gates and approval checkpoints. Design system validation requirements. Accessibility and usability review standards. Development implementation review process. The process became a shared reference point for the Product Design team and provided a foundation for future process improvements and team onboarding.
I led the initiative from discovery through implementation, facilitating collaboration across Product Design, Product Management, and Engineering teams.
Understanding existing workflows and identifying pain points.
Reviewing current QA activities, responsibilities, and handover processes.
Documenting the current-state process and identifying inefficiencies.
Creating a future-state QA framework and governance model.
Reviewing proposed workflows with stakeholders and refining based on feedback.
Documenting, communicating, and supporting adoption across the team.
Methods used
Different product teams were solving similar problems in different ways, leading to:
This lack of cohesion made it harder to scale products efficiently and maintain a strong, recognizable product experience.
I led the design system initiative across multiple teams, balancing immediate product needs with long-term scalability.
Key activities included:
Research focused on understanding the current product landscape, team workflows, and user experience across web and mobile. The aim was to identify gaps, inconsistencies, and opportunities to inform the design system.
What I did
How it informed the work
These insights helped prioritise what to standardise first, shaped the system foundations, and ensured the design system solved real team and user problems rather than just creating UI consistency.
The Tracker Design System became a central source of truth for product teams. It established clear foundations including typography, colour, spacing, and layout, with accessibility built in from the start.
A reusable component library was created for web, designed to stay aligned with mobile patterns where possible. Close collaboration with engineering ensured components were implemented effectively, supported by clear documentation for both designers and developers.
The system was built to scale across multiple products, with the flexibility to adapt to different use cases over time.
Strong collaboration across design, product, and engineering made a big difference. Early alignment on principles and priorities helped teams move in the same direction, and rolling the system out gradually made it easier to adopt without slowing delivery.
Aligning multiple teams with different goals and timelines was not always easy. There were trade-offs between speed and maintaining system quality, and getting consistent adoption across teams took time and ongoing support.
I would invest earlier in governance and clearer contribution guidelines to reduce confusion as the system grew. I would also involve engineering even earlier in defining foundations to strengthen alignment from the start.