Unifying three design systems into one AI-ready foundation
When I joined as Director of Design Systems & Foundations, I inherited three different design systems running in parallel — inconsistent UX, drifting visual design, broken components, and no shared direction. The most promising of the three was tightly coupled to a single UI platform, and none of it was built for the way software gets made now: there was no AI presence anywhere. This is the story of how I turned that fragmented inheritance into Summit — a single, platform-agnostic, AI-friendly design system — and the strategy that made it adoptable across the company.
The goal
Give every Constant Contact product one coherent, trustworthy foundation — one that works regardless of UI platform and that both humans and AI can read, reason about, and build with. Consistency was the surface goal; leverage was the real one. A change made once in the system should ripple everywhere, instead of being re-litigated team by team.
Updates will be added as my team rolls out Summit, our new Agentic Design System.