The territory
Six teams, four codebases, and a component library nobody trusted. Every team had solved the same twelve problems privately, which meant every fix had to be made six times. Nobody could say what the system covered, so nobody could say what it was missing.
The first job was not to design anything. It was to make the disagreement visible — one wall, every button anyone shipped, sorted until the real axes appeared.
If two people read a token name differently, the system already has a bug.
What I did
- Audited 214 shipped components down to 31 real families.
- Wrote the token layer first, semantics before values, so the palette could change without a migration.
- Ran a weekly open review — adoption, not enforcement.
- Left an explicit list of what the system deliberately does not cover.
Where it stands
Four of six teams are on the token layer. The other two have reasons I agree with, which is the point: the system is a proposal that has to keep earning its adoption.