Driving Cultural Change Through Design Systems at Etsy

Background‍

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I led the adoption of Etsy’s design system to unify the product experience, embed systems into design culture, and lay the foundation for a major redesign and brand refresh.

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Collage is Etsy’s design system, supporting both buyer- and seller-facing experiences across web, iOS, Android, and Flutter. Over time, Etsy’s product experience had evolved organically, resulting in fragmented interfaces, visual design inconsistencies, and unclear patterns across features. While Collage offered a solid foundation, adoption varied and expectations around how and when to use the design system were unclear.

I was brought on to lead design systems during a pivotal moment: a brand refresh and native app redesign were on the horizon and there was a growing need to unify the product experience across surfaces. I focused on adoption by strengthening design system guidance, supporting foundational cleanup, and creating an engagement model to build trust, increase visibility, and offer deeper design system support. These efforts helped align adoption with high-impact company initiatives while reinforcing systems as a core part of Etsy’s design culture and craft.

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Approach

Before proposing changes or setting direction, I prioritized listening and observing—taking time to understand the landscape, the problem space, and how teams were engaging with design systems at Etsy as I was onboarding into my new role. Meeting people where they were helped shape a strategy for Collage that felt relevant, achievable, and impactful.

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Strategic leadership

• Set a clear vision for Collage that aligned with company-wide priorities, including a brand refresh and native app redesign.
• Defined a multi-quarter roadmap that translated high-level business and design objectives into clear, actionable design system initiatives spanning adoption, education, documentation, and tooling.
• Positioned the design system as an enabler of consistency, cohesion, and brand expression across Etsy’s product ecosystem.
• Contributed systems-specific competencies to Etsy’s quality craft framework, clarifying expectations for using the design system and designing for patterns, modularity, and consistency across products and features.

Build trust and alignment

• Evolved the design system team’s engagement model to increase visibility and support by creating regular touchpoints through office hours, critique, design reviews, training, and embedded partnerships.
• Led discovery workshops with design leadership, product designers, and brand partners to understand how the system was being used in practice, surface pain points, and identify gaps in education, guidance, and coverage.
• Collaborated with product design managers to audit their teams’ surface and system usage, encouraging thoughtful reflection on consistency, quality, and patterns. These conversations helped shift adoption from a centralized effort to a shared responsibility for strengthening design quality across Etsy’s product ecosystem.
• Facilitated a design sprint with brand and product design leaders to align on a shared vision for Etsy’s design language. This collaborative kickoff built momentum, clarified early areas for refinement, and fostered buy-in around the system’s role in expressing the brand.

Design system adoption

• Defined a long-term strategy to increase design system coverage, while focusing short-term efforts on adopting a narrow set of high-impact, token-based foundations – including spacing, typography, and color – to deliver immediate value.
• Coordinated with product teams to implement these changes ahead of the holiday code freeze, aligning cleanup with roadmap priorities and securing leadership buy-in to prioritize adoption at scale.
• Delivered updated usage guidelines for design foundations to support token adoption, clarifying how design elements should be applied and helping designers use the system as intended.
• Launched a custom linting plugin in Figma to support designers in adopting design tokens (variables) and phasing out deprecated legacy styles.

Impact

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This work marked the beginning of a larger transformation. While still in progress, we saw early wins that reflected the groundwork I laid—building momentum for broader adoption, long-term system maturity, and lasting cultural change.

• 90% adoption of token-based foundations ahead of the 2024 holiday code freeze across key surfaces.
• Positioned Collage to support a phased rollout of Etsy’s refreshed brand identity across all supported platforms: web, iOS, Android, and Flutter.
• Added systems as a core pillar of Etsy’s quality craft expectations for product designers. These competencies are used in performance evaluations, reinforcing adoption as an ongoing expectation – not a one time effort.