System adoption at scale — with teams who didn't choose it.
Three IBM products. Eight acquired products. One platform. I led the migration to Carbon Design System (IBM's open-source design system), aligning legacy design systems, disparate engineering cultures, 20+ engineers, and an acquired design team around a unified foundation.
Governance only works when teams want to be governed. This is the strategy behind driving measurable adoption across eight acquired products — the sequencing, the trade-offs, and the compliance framework used to report progress to senior leadership.
The story
The challenge & strategy
IBM's acquisition of webMethods.io brought eight products into a single platform — every one looking different, built against a different design system, with no shared tokens and none choosing Carbon. The challenge wasn't just visual, it was cultural: define a migration strategy from scratch that teams at very different levels of maturity would actually commit to.
Component-level migration wasn't realistic at this scale and timeline. I focused on the foundations — colour, typography, iconography, and navigation — the changes with the biggest visual impact and the lowest implementation cost. The strategy wasn't rigid either: where Carbon would have hurt the experience, we made exceptions. The goal wasn't perfect uniformity — it was adoption.
The craft
Colour mapping matrices weren't enough — teams needed something more concrete. I created product-specific reference screens showing Carbon applied to real UI, giving teams a clear target to build towards. For iconography, I led a small team — mapping every icon across the acquired products and designing 30+ new Carbon icons together to close migration gaps.
Alongside the delivery work, I directly managed two designers — one of whom had owned the design system we were replacing, which made motivation reviews particularly important. I also coached the product team designers to upskill them in Carbon and build their confidence applying it in their work.
Holding the bar
Detailed feedback sessions gave teams support, but couldn't answer the question everyone was asking: how far away are we? I designed a compliance review process from scratch — a three-tier rubric across six criteria that gave teams a clear target and leadership a measurable view of progress.
Issues weren't just identified — they were tracked, prioritised, and worked through against a shared definition of success. Teams knew what to do next, and leadership could see progress product by product. It was, in effect, the system's first governance model — a shared, trackable definition of readiness that made adoption measurable across eight products.
What came next
Before leaving the project, I co-led a three-day Phase 2 planning workshop with 30+ participants across the eight acquired products — aligning on a single strategy for design tokens, component migration, and deeper navigational patterns. 21 out of 21 survey respondents agreed it had fully met its objectives.
Phase 2 didn't proceed after priorities changed. But teams had been upskilled in Carbon and had a clear path to continue. The most important outcome wasn't the migration itself — it was turning Carbon from something teams were asked to adopt into something they wanted to build with.
