Bank of Ireland

Three surfaces. No shared production rhythm.

Web, mobile and internal tooling were designed by separate teams with no common handoff process, no shared component baseline and no real-time feedback loop.

Ship in parallel. Feed the DS immediately.

Every validated screen went directly into the design system. No batch handoff at sprint end. Specs via Figma Dev Mode with full edge case documentation. Decisions traced in ADR.

Production in motion, not in batches.

Weekly design reviews with BoI devs kept the loop tight. The DS grew with the product rather than catching up to it.

A legacy base that could not be discarded.

The existing DS had partial adoption across teams. Rebuilding from scratch would have reset trust and delayed delivery. Leaving it unchanged meant accumulating structural debt.

Extend. Don't replace. Token architecture first.

A three-level token structure, primitives, semantic and component, was established as the non-negotiable foundation. Components were then built on top, with full variant and state coverage.

A living system, not a delivered artifact.

Documentation lived in Confluence, updated in real time. Each structural decision was recorded in an ADR so the system could evolve without losing its original intent.

Three branches. No arbitration structure.

Without a shared decision forum, each branch would evolve the system independently. Fragmentation was not a risk, it was the default trajectory.

Put governance in rooms, not docs.

A monthly Design Council with one representative per branch was established as the binding arbitration structure. Presence at Copil and Codir kept design decisions upstream.

Coherence maintained without central authority.

Fragmentation was intercepted at decision level, not patched at component level. C-level stakeholders understood coherence as a business cost, not a design preference.