Scaling a design system is hard. Scaling one without a dedicated team, across two departments, four different teams, and reporting lines that stretch up to two directors and a VP — while the company around you is navigating one of the most turbulent stretches in aviation history — is a different kind of hard.
That's where I've been living for the past few years.
The challenges came in threes. Getting native engineering to buy in. Finding budget and headcount in a difficult environment. And building the tooling infrastructure — component inventory, documentation, living style guide — the operational bits that determine whether a system scales.
None of these are fully solved. I want to be honest about that.
Southwest faced serious headwinds — operational crises, investor pressure, business model shifts, and the first layoffs in company history. In that environment, securing resources for a program that lives between departments, without a clean org chart line, was consistently an uphill conversation.
A design system isn't just a technical challenge. It's an organizational one.
The components are the easy part. The hard part is alignment — getting the right people pointed in the same direction, across teams with different priorities, timelines, and definitions of done.
But this year feels different. Efficiency is at the top of leadership's agenda. I have a new leader who gets it. And for the first time, I have the organizational momentum to right-size the program — solidify the foundation, build the tools we've always needed, and turn what has been an exceptionally resilient grassroots effort into something that scales.
The system survived things it probably shouldn't have. Now it's time to let it thrive.