02 / IBM · Carbon · 2020 — 2023
Design system governance at scale
Contributed patterns, review rituals, and accessibility guardrails to Carbon so hundreds of product teams could ship faster together.
Role
Senior Product Designer · Carbon contributor
Team
Federated across 200+ product teams
Duration
Ongoing over three years
Platforms
Design system · Web components · Figma libraries
Problem
A design system is only as good as its adoption ritual.
Carbon was mature — thousands of components, dozens of tokens, accessibility built in. What was missing was a governance model that let product teams contribute upstream without breaking downstream consumers.
Teams were forking components, drifting quietly, then rediscovering the fork three quarters later during an accessibility audit.
Process
Less about pixels, more about the meta-work around them.
01 · Contribution paths
Mapped the three ways a team touched Carbon — consuming, extending, contributing — and designed a distinct ritual for each.
02 · Review cadence
Biweekly pattern review with a rotating panel. I helped set the rubric: does it solve a real, repeatable problem? Is the API narrow? Does it meet WCAG 2.1 AA?
03 · A11y guardrails
Wrote the accessibility annotation template that shipped with every new pattern proposal — required before code review.
04 · Docs as onboarding
Rewrote the 'contributing' documentation as a step-by-step, so a new team could ship a pattern in a week instead of a quarter.
Results
Fewer forks. More upstream contributions. Faster shipping.
−41%
component forks per quarter
3×
upstream contributions
AA
accessibility baseline held
Component forking dropped meaningfully after the governance model landed, and upstream contributions tripled in the following year. The larger win was cultural — pattern review became something teams looked forward to, not something they dreaded.
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