Digital Product Manager, Design Ops · Southwest Airlines
Responsive Homepage
The Responsive Homepage was a significant milestone for the Heart Design System. As DPM on the Design Ops team, I managed and guided the work that became the largest single adoption of HDS up to that point — bringing together design tokens, components, and responsive layout patterns into a cohesive, production-ready experience at the front door of southwest.com.
Context
Prior to this project, southwest.com's homepage had accumulated years of design debt — inconsistent type scales, hand-rolled components that didn't trace back to any shared library, and a layout that predated the company's responsive strategy. Heart DS had been established, but it hadn't yet been stress-tested at this scale or in a single-page application context.
What the team built
The homepage became the first SPA to be built with the full Heart DS token and component stack. That meant making real decisions about how the system translated to a high-traffic, content-rich surface — and surfacing gaps in HDS coverage that the consuming team and system team had to work through together. This kind of production feedback loop is what helps a design system grow from theoretical to durable.
The token timing
At the time the project kicked off, Heart DS had components but hadn't fully shipped design tokens — the named, semantic variables that let a change to "brand color" propagate everywhere automatically. The team made the call to build against the components as they existed and treat a token follow-up as a fast-follow. That follow-up landed quickly, and the homepage became one of the first experiences to benefit from the full token layer once it shipped.
Outcome
The Responsive Homepage set a template for how teams at Southwest approach HDS adoption at scale. It demonstrated the system was production-ready for complex, high-traffic surfaces, surfaced a focused list of system improvements, and proved that a well-resourced adoption effort could do more to mature a design system than incremental contributions over time.