The Weekend and the Proof

Then came what I'd call my AI awakening. Southwest is conservative about AI tooling, but once internal Copilot access and Figma's AI features landed, I prototyped a component inventory tool in a single weekend.

It included a dashboard for design system health metrics, an agent that could answer real-time questions about the system (freeing my one designer from fielding every question that came up in a project meeting), an intake process that forced actual thought into a component request instead of just lobbing a question at us, visibility into who owns which component, and a booking system to replace poorly-attended office hours.

Most of that is still a vision. The prototype is genuinely paused, not actively being built out, because HDS itself isn't in a state to be easily made AI-readable yet. It's homegrown and inconsistent in ways that need to be resolved first. But it gave me a concrete case for a larger team, and a real plan for closing out v1 and addressing the gaps that show up when you scale something fast with minimal support.

One outcome is already real. We never moved forward on an estimated $150K-a-year vendor purchase, an early figure from initial conversations, before procurement negotiations would have shaped a final number. We're planning to build our own tool instead.

The first-ever HDS satisfaction survey, in 2025, returned an NPS of 21.43. The most recent survey, in June 2026, returned an NPS of 52 — a real, measured improvement, not a claimed one.

The same surveys also confirmed things I'd known since the system's early days but had only ever had as observation, not data: documentation gaps, and a governance bottleneck around needing to route requests through a single person. Leaders work off data, not feelings, so gathering this wasn't a surprise that had to be solved for. It was proof for an argument I'd already been making.