Scaling a Design System Across 100+ Websites

Led the Website Experience Subsystem (WES), a unified web design system for 100+ Salesforce marketing websites (400K+ pages), including Salesforce.com, Trailhead and AppExchange.

Reframed the challenge from component standardization to system adoption—aligning a fragmented web ecosystem into a scalable foundation for consistent brand expression, faster delivery, and long-term system sustainability.

Role

Sole design owner of WES, leading both system design and adoption strategy across the Salesforce websites. Defined system architecture, drove cross-team adoption, and established contribution and feedback models in partnership with engineering and design leadership.

Challenges

The Salesforce web ecosystem operated as a highly fragmented environment, with each site built and maintained independently.

This resulted in inconsistent user experiences, duplicated effort across teams, and low trust in centralized design systems.

Additional constraints—including limited visibility, inconsistent implementation patterns, and shifting priorities—made adoption and alignment across teams particularly challenging.

Strategies

Lowered adoption barriers through an implementation strategy
Delivered components in HTML/CSS and enabled gradual adoption of Lightning Web Components to meet teams where they were.

Operationalized distributed contribution
Established contribution workflows, guidance, and support to ensure quality while scaling shared ownership.

Institutionalized feedback loops
Embedded continuous feedback through audits, interviews, and direct collaboration to inform ongoing system evolution.

Impact

Impact

Scaled a unified design system across 100+ Salesforce marketing websites, transforming a fragmented ecosystem into a coordinated, system-driven foundation.

Adoption & Scale

Achieved 85% adoption across supported websites by prioritizing usability and real-world integration, enabling teams to consistently implement and rely on the system.

Organizational Impact

Shifted teams from isolated execution to shared ownership, increasing alignment, reuse, and trust in the system while turning product teams into active contributors.

System Maturity

Established a sustainable contribution and governance model, accelerating delivery through shared design and code foundations and evolving WES into a formally supported subsystem with dedicated ownership.

Design

Components

These screenshots highlight a selection of component designs, reflecting the collaborative efforts between the contributors and me in their development.

Guidelines

WES components are and the Salesforce Design Systems site, giving internal users easy access to component symbols, design guidelines, and code for seamless integration.

Tooling

Documented in the WES Figma Library as a shared Salesforce design resource.