2024
Holm Systems
Adopted by 40+ teams. Component library with 180+ components.
The Challenge
Holm Systems is an enterprise software company with 600 engineers across 40 product teams. Each team had built their own UI components independently — the result was a product that looked different depending on which part you were using, and a company spending thousands of engineering hours rebuilding the same buttons, forms, and modals over and over. They had tried twice before to build a design system. Both times it had stalled and been abandoned within six months.
The Solution
The previous attempts had failed for a predictable reason: they were built by a central team in isolation and then handed over to product teams who hadn't been involved. Adoption was treated as a rollout problem rather than a design problem. We approached this differently. We started by running two weeks of interviews with engineers and designers across eight product teams — understanding what they actually needed, what had frustrated them about the previous attempts, and what would make them trust and use a shared system. The design system we built was token-based, with a clear separation between primitive components and pattern-level compositions. We wrote documentation that treated engineers as the primary audience. We ran office hours every week for the first six months. We tracked adoption not as a vanity metric but as a signal of whether we were building the right thing. Eighteen months later, the system has 180+ components, 40 teams using it in production, and a dedicated internal team maintaining it. The estimated time saved across the company is 14,000 engineering hours per year.
