Shipping a design system inside a fintech dashboard

Build it in the product, not beside it

Northwind Labs could not pause feature work for a system rebuild, so we did not ask them to. Every component was extracted from a screen that was already shipping. The first versions of the button, the table and the date picker came out of the live dashboard, not out of a blank file.

That kept the system honest. A component only joined the library once it had survived two real screens with real data. Anything that needed a third variant to cope got a second look before it got a fourth prop.

Migration without a freeze

We shipped the library as a package with a codemod for each breaking change, so teams upgraded in an afternoon instead of a sprint. Old and new components ran side by side behind a flag for six weeks. By the end, 94 percent of screens used the system and the remaining ones were scheduled, not forgotten.

The full engagement is written up on our work page.