The Citi Design System.
How we built one shared language for a 200-year-old bank — and got 150+ designers across the world to actually use it.
The brief
40 products, 40 dialects.
Citi's risk and controls technology org has dozens of internal products built over fifteen years by different teams. Most predate the idea of a design system. Each app had its own buttons, its own color logic, its own way of saying "are you sure?" Designers were rebuilding the same components from scratch every sprint. Engineering velocity was suffering, and so was usability.
The brief was deceptively simple: build the foundation of a shared design system — and, harder, convince the org to use it.
The approach
Audit first. Then design.
Before drawing a single component, we spent six weeks auditing what existed. Screenshots from 23 products, every modal, every form field, every error state. We mapped the actual variation so the system would absorb reality rather than fight it.
The audit became the most persuasive deliverable of the project. When leaders saw seven shades of "warning yellow" side by side, the case for the system made itself. Tokens came first, components second, patterns third — each layer a contract that let the next one move faster.
The shift
From scattered to shared.
We shipped v1 with the smallest viable kit — typography, color, spacing, and ten core components. Then we shipped weekly. The strategy was to make adoption the path of least resistance: clear Figma libraries, a documentation site, office hours every Friday, and a Slack channel where any designer could ask anything without judgment.
The outcome
Two years in.
The system is now the default starting point for every new product in the risk-tech org, and several teams outside it have voluntarily migrated. The numbers tell part of the story — the rest is cultural.
What I took with me
A system is a community, not a library.
The Figma file matters less than the people who maintain it. What made this work wasn't the components — it was the office hours, the welcome to ask dumb questions, the willingness to say "the system is wrong, let's fix it" out loud.
I came in thinking my job was to design components. I left understanding that my job was to design how teams work together. The components were just the artifact.