Owned the operating model for the critically under-staffed LaunchPad Design System, standing up a contribution model, guild, and triage system so any designer or engineer can contribute back, multiplying the team’s capacity and output.

Problem

LaunchPad is LaunchDarkly's design system: a shared set of components, patterns, and standards used across product teams to help teams design and build consistent product experiences faster. Nobody owned the LaunchPad design system. Without clear ownership or dedicated design system staffing, improvements were handled by individual feature teams. As LaunchDarkly continues to grow and rapidly expand into multiple product lines, and without a design system infrastructure that grows with us, we saw that:

• Tech debt was spiraling out of control which led to engineers building ad-hoc components because it was easier, causing slower feature launches.
• There were inefficiencies in the design phase which led to designers creating inconsistent and disconnected user experiences because they couldn't rely on an immature and broken Figma library.
• Agentic velocity immediately stalled due to the contradictions in our own codebase, despite attempts to encode rules.

One notable example is with the acquisition of two formed products where incoming teams were tasked with converting to use LaunchPad. We saw product delivery slow down due to the design systems immaturity.

Solution

I owned the contribution operating model that sets up a weekly cadence where one designer pauses their current project work to spend 100% of their time contributing to the LaunchPad design system. Responsibilities include using AI tooling to incrementally fix paper cuts, update legacy components and address product inconsistencies in code, and maintain the Figma Library. I also created a triaging system so that the work is driven by a maintained backlog of real issues.

Impact

After a 4 week trial and understanding the positive impact its had, the model has been officially adopted, renamed to The LaunchPad Guild, and expanded. The UX team and a group of dedicated engineers jointly own the roadmap, quality, and maintenance that allows LaunchPad to keep moving forward. Because LaunchPad serves all of Product Delivery and clear guidelines are set, everyone is able to contribute.

We also fixed how LaunchPad ships. The design system lived in two repositories, and the release model between them was slow and risky:

• Two-repo split. A public-facing launchpad-ui package open-sourced on npm, and gonfalon/launchpad-experimental inside our monolith.
• Painful releases. Updating meant stacking a quarter's worth of PRs against launchpad-ui, merging, and deploying to npm, then bumping gonfalon/launchpad-experimental to the new version and rebuilding the entire application, which took a few hours.
• Incident-prone. That model let breaking changes slip through that were near impossible to roll back and often required an incident to fix immediately.
• Consolidated into the monolith. We dedicated design and engineering resources to port the launchpad-ui components into gonfalon and deprecate the standalone package.
• Weekly cadence with rollback. The team now ships directly to the design system every week and can roll back any breaking change. Freed from that friction, the design team makes consistent improvements to our components, addressing accessibility and user experience concerns from real-time feedback.

I own and lead Brand X Product, an initiative that, for the first time in LaunchDarkly history, introduces brand and marketing elements into the product. The goal is to carry our brand voice and personality into the app so the experience feels cohesive from trial to paid account. One component I designed, built, and shipped is OnboardingEmptyState, which educates and helps customers create entities in each product area, such as flags and experiments.