Scaled Enterprise Efficiency & Cohesion w/ Design System
Enterprise Design Strategy & Consolidated Design System Resulted in Better UX & Massive Cost Savings Across 4 of Fidelity’s Business Units
Summary
Defined and scaled Fidelity’s enterprise design strategy, bringing four business units and three design systems together into one cohesive, systems-driven platform.
As a player-coach, I balanced hands-on design and content work with mentoring, research, and strategic leadership to deliver measurable results.
Challenge
Fragmented design practice, duplicated work, and inconsistent UX across BUs threatened scalability, efficiency, and alignment. The challenge was to unify design practices, improve adoption, and accelerate agile delivery in a complex, data-heavy, highly-regulated environment.
Approach
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered with leadership and engineering to align UX goals with product strategy and ensure technical feasibility.
Research & Validation: Used JTBD frameworks, A/B testing & analytics to uncover pain points and set benchmarks.
Player-Coach Execution: Contributed directly to flows, prototypes, and content while mentoring designers and sharing best practices.
Measurement & Benchmarking: Established metrics and quality benchmarks for cohesion, system adoption, and design standards adherence.
Helios enterprise design strategy (Figma)
Working doc, design principle iteration (Mural)
Outcomes
Design & Business Alignment: Achieved enterprise alignment by connecting 80+ product teams to multi-year strategy and business-unit goals.
Adoption & Sustainability: Over 75% of teams adopted the unified design system, resulting in a 30% reduction in code overrides that previously created tech debt.
Efficiency & Cost Savings: Reduced duplicated effort and improved time to market by 35%, while cutting costs by 20%.
Improved User Experience: Scaled design quality across 100+ products, increasing adherence to standards and improving heuristic and accessibility scores.
Reflection
Through this initiative, I proved the power of uniting business, tech, and design into scalable, human-centered systems.
My player-coach approach and emphasis on governance, measurement, and change management ensured adoption, credibility, and long-term sustainability.
Just as importantly, the work elevated the reputation of design within the firm, strengthening cross-functional relationships and earning design a seat at more strategic discussions.
UX Quality Scorecard co-created with User Research (Figma)
Design strategy training session, attended by nearly 10k employees