In spring 2022, if you visited SVB.com and logged in to the SVB Go banking platform, you might have thought you had made a mistake. The use of colors, typography, icons, and components was so different that it looked like two different companies. This was because marketing and product design teams barely communicated with each other, and each team had its own design system.

Around that same time, a small group from marketing and product design started meeting to finally solve the problem. Our goal was to unify our disparate systems into one that could be used across the company.

Challenges

Radio Silence

During my four years at SVB, both as a consultant and full-time employee, I can count on one hand the number of times that product and marketing collaborated effectively. Due to a lack of communication between the two groups, people are still surprised to learn that marketing has its own UX designers, with whom they have never interacted with.

Different Languages

The needs of the marketing and product teams could not have been more different. From the kind of design each group was doing to the technology that was used, everything was different. As a result, we had to pivot several times before agreeing on a solution.

Creating Alignment

With such a large organization, which has so many moving parts, it took us quite a while to get the buy-in we needed to accelerate the work.

Taking the Lead

As we started the work we identified a few areas that we want to focus on first. One of those was agreeing on how we would approach color and typography. SVB had just gone through a rebranding, so it was the perfect time to explore this area.

Fortunately I had already been doing a lot of research on this topic and had created some rough color and type systems which we ended up using as a jumping off point for the final version. That process became a common theme throughout the project, due to my enthusiasm and prior knowledge I organically started to lead the project without realizing it.

Highlights

• Collaborated with other designers, stakeholders to create a robust color and typography system that fit the needs of both marketing and product design

• Led the design of a library of common UI components working closely with designers from the marketing team

• Successfully influenced stakeholders at multiple levels to agree on the direction and purpose of this new unified system

• Opened lines of communication between marketing and product

Universal Language

Getting design aligned proved to be much easier than we thought it would be, but the same couldn’t be said for tech. The technology side of product and marketing were even further apart from each other than design was. Marketing was using a custom framework based on HTML, CSS and Javascript, while product was using the Material UI React framework.

The initial reaction to our initial proposal was very hostile, so much so that I ended up play the role of mediator to calm everyone down. This was well out of my comfort zone, but I was able to get everyone to see our goals are the same, we just needed to figure out how to get there together.

After doing some extensive research I proposed the idea of design tokens to the team and after a bit of education everyone agreed that this approach would work across the different technologies used by each group

Highlights

• Successfully moderated multiple meetings with very difficult personalities, ending each of them with an agreement on the next steps

• Created alignment across marketing, brand, product design and tech on the approach to build our system using design tokens

• Researched and led the team to create a robust token taxonomy and a basic set of tokens we aimed to test

• Throughout this process was able to turn very contentious relationships with tech into steadfast allies

Outcomes

This project was very challenging for me as it got me out of my comfort zone and put me in a position of leadership, which was very new to me.

Below are a few things I’ve learned and accomplished:

• Building a design system is less about the libraries and artifacts, but more about the people working on it and those who will consume it. And having a shared vision of what the system will be

• I gained a lot of experience with being in a position of leadership, how to go about influencing stakeholders and team members

• Through this project we had successfully broken down the silo between marketing and product design. We had open lines of communication and decisions were only being made after both sides weighed in