I started with a full audit, every component across design and code, every visual inconsistency, every place where the two libraries had drifted apart. Then I sat down with two engineers, and we built shared standards from scratch together, which was the only way to make something both sides would actually use.

The rebuilt Armada system ended up with roughly 100 components, all complex, all documented, migrated into Figma with a component-linking structure designed to stay in sync as the product evolved. I introduced shared vocabulary between design and engineering so that conversations about components stopped being arguments about whose version was right.

When corporate pushed a rebrand with two weeks' notice, Armada became the reason we could push back intelligently. I ran a full analysis of what the new brand standards would actually require in production, and found real problems. The new color combinations didn't pass accessibility standards. Proposed hover states failed contrast checks. The updated logo spacing rules would have forced us to increase the nav bar height, which our enterprise customers had been asking us to shrink for years; we'd just gotten it down to 50px. And the new spacing system assumed a single visual density, which doesn't work in a B2B tool where some screens are designed to look clean, and some are intentionally dense data tables built to show as much as possible on a small screen. We implemented the rebrand. But we implemented it correctly, adapting the standards to the product's actual constraints rather than blindly applying rules that would have broken things.

By the time I left, the team had grown from five designers to eight. All of them working from the same system.