Proton

The inheritance

Proton was not missing. It was ignored.

• 200+ components, ninety percent never instantiated in a real screen.
• No naming convention: the same control existed three times under three labels.
• No documentation: learning a component meant finding whoever had used it.
• Figma did not match code, so nothing in the file could be trusted in the build.

Engineering adoption sat at twelve percent. That is a verdict: the library cost more to use than to bypass.

From the docs

We have seen design systems die before.

The first thing an engineer said to me. Fair, and it set the shape of the work: not a better component, but the question back. What would you need from this to use it.

The team made it harder: three designers split across India and the USA, ten and a half hours apart, working in silos. All of it repaired while shipping Panorama 360 to a six month deadline, on the same library.

Phase one was counting, not drawing

The first two weeks produced no design. They produced a list: every component counted by how often it was actually instantiated. Nobody defends a component that no screen uses, so the deletions were not contested.

Four phases, in this order, because out of order is how consolidations stall.

Phase	Weeks	What happened
Audit	1 to 2	All 200 components counted by instantiation, not by opinion
Consolidate	3 to 6	Near duplicates collapsed. Five buttons became one with variants
Document	7 to 10	Every surviving component got when to use and when NOT to use
Align	11 onward	Twenty core components rebuilt with engineering so Figma matched code

Two hundred became roughly one hundred, all actively used. Deleting a component is more effective than a guideline asking people not to use it.

Documentation was the deliverable, not the artefact

With ten and a half hours between the designers, documentation was the only channel that worked while half the team slept. Every page answers three things: what this is for, what it binds to, and when NOT to use it.

Friday Fundamentals

The silo problem and the governance problem had the same fix: one fixed slot every Friday, inside the three hour overlap window.

• One to one coaching. Three half hours. The part that gets cut first everywhere else, and the part that made people show up for the rest.
• Team critique. Run on I notice, I wonder, what if, so unfinished work is safe to bring. Unfinished work is the kind worth critiquing.
• Component of the Week. The team votes: publish, iterate, or reject. That vote turned the library from mine into ours.
• The monthly Proton Purge. Unused for thirty days, it goes. Written down, not negotiable.

Response time on a design question fell from a day to six hours. Design to production consistency went from sixty percent to ninety five.

Ownership, distributed on purpose

A system that routes through one person stalls when that person sleeps, and someone always was. So each designer owned an area outright.

Owner	Area
Designer 1, India	Data visualisation
Designer 2, USA	Layout and structure
Designer 3, India	Interactions and forms
Me, lead	System governance

Each person got work slightly above their level, shown at company all hands. Ownership that is never visible is just extra responsibility.

The objections, and what actually answered them

None of these was answered with a document.

• “We have seen design systems die before.” Answered with a question back, then a deal on engineering’s terms.
• Duplicates crept back, from about fifty core components up to sixty five. Answered with a proposal process and a locked library. Most requests resolved into an existing component used correctly.
• “This is a black box.” Show the reasoning and the confidence, not just the conclusion.
• Silos. Friday Fundamentals: the one answer that is a calendar entry rather than an argument.

Two calls from before the playbook existed

What it changed

Adoption went from twelve percent to eighty five in three months, measured the same way at both ends: the share of new screens built from the library, counted at review. Handoff fell from two weeks to two days. Fifty components now run across five or more regional products, and engineering adopted Friday Fundamentals too, which was the moment it stopped being a design ritual.

From the docs

This is the first design system we have actually used.

That is Lucy Chu, a senior engineer. It is the one result on this page I did not have to calculate.

The product it was built for

None of the above was fundable on its own. It was paid for by Panorama 360: a portfolio dashboard product managers opened once a month, compiled a report from by hand, and closed.

Before · the monthly report

After · Panorama 360

1. A monthly reporting screen becomes a daily landing page, scannable in about thirty seconds.
2. Portfolio totals move to the top, so the first glance answers what changed since the last visit.
3. Every AI recommendation shows its reasoning and its confidence, because nobody acts on a black box.
4. Use moved from roughly once a month to about five times a week.

Product managers did not want more data. They wanted to stop feeling stupid in front of their own portfolio. Recommendation acceptance reached eighty seven percent, and the weekly assembly time fell from four hours to two.