RetailMeNot / Design System
NEDThe design system three product lines now build on
Led a team of 3. Audit to rollout in three quarters.
- Role
- Product Design Manager. Strategy and execution, hands on throughout.
- Partners
- Head of Engineering, VP of Marketing, 2 Senior Product Designers, 1 Art Director.
- Audience
- Executive leadership across Marketing, Sales, Engineering and Content.
- 2/3
- Build time cut
- 3
- Product lines unified
- 3 qtrs
- To full adoption
Problem
Three competing design systems, none of them finished. The cost was duplicated work, products that had drifted apart, and a handoff that slowed engineering down.
Janell McCanna
Sr. Product Designer
Product design, research, strategy, stakeholder alignment, information architecture, visual design, copywriting, QA
Chon Shoaff
Art Director + Designer
Product design, research, strategy, visual design, copywriting
Michelle Young
Sr. Product Designer
Research and product design
Product and marketing were working from three incomplete design systems. None could serve as a single source of truth. I made the case for roadmap time to fix it, then led three designers through a company-wide audit, a build-vs-buy evaluation, and a three-phase rollout.
The result was NED, a fully tokenized global design system named for "No Expiration Date," a term from the deals space. It put product and marketing on one toolset, took friction out of handoff, and got its first real test on the browser extension redesign.
Role
Product Design Manager. Strategy and execution, hands on throughout.
Partners
Head of Engineering, VP of Marketing, 2 Senior Product Designers, 1 Art Director.
Audience
Executive leadership across Marketing, Sales, Engineering and Content.
Outcome
Build times cut by two thirds. Adopted by 4 teams. One global design system.
Background
Designers had been working around this for years. Components were duplicated across teams. Typography styles had multiplied. Every breakpoint meant redrawing the same screen.
Roadmap time is the real constraint on a product team, so the work started with advocacy. I spent months making the case to leadership that a design system is infrastructure, not polish, and that product and engineering both depended on it. Framing it that way is what earned us the space.
Then we audited. We found three systems in different states of completion, none built to scale across both product and marketing. That kicked off a company-wide review of every component we had.
The findings were blunt. Years of work by rotating designers had left enough inconsistency that fixing it would cost more than starting over. So we started over.
Approach
Three designers and a full roadmap to support. The question wasn't only what to build. It was how to build it cheaply.
Evaluating the foundation
Janell researched existing kits and surfaced 25 options across a range of price points and feature sets, plus case studies from teams who had done this before. Design and engineering evaluated them together and chose Align UI unanimously. It was built for React and styled with Tailwind, which matched our stack and promised a cleaner handoff. Once we bought it, we compared it against our products side by side to see what we would still need to build ourselves.
A three-phased plan
I brought leadership a three-phase plan: ideate, test, implement. Three quarters to full adoption and Storybook ingestion. They signed on.
Q1 / Phase 1
Communication and education
Whether this worked came down to how well other teams understood it. The more our partners saw what the system unlocked, the more it changed how we worked day to day. Responsive grids alone meant designing once instead of once per breakpoint.
- ·Consistency across product lines that had drifted apart
- ·Less friction in developer handoff
- ·Fewer components and type styles, all consolidated
- ·One shared toolset for marketing and product
- ·Product and brand standards documented, made AI-accessible through Storybook
Q2 / Phase 2
Consolidating guidelines
We worked with social, brand, and marketing to fold each team's guidelines in, so every standard lived in one place.
- ·In parallel we structured the file itself for the long run: documentation layouts, per-component requirements, and the research to stand up Storybook as living documentation
Q3 / Phase 3
Build
My role shifted from directing to collaborating and reviewing as Janell took the lead on skinning foundational components. We ran working sessions, follow-up audits, and reviews.
- ·Updates went out at all-hands, in weekly leadership notes, and at a bi-weekly cross-team session we called NED-Talks, where we showed progress and worked through what would change for each team
Outcomes
NED is already proving itself.
We built RetailMeNot's latest browser extension redesign on it, and the difference showed up right away.
Faster build times
On a real, shipped product.
Faster iteration and prototyping
The grid handles responsive behavior instead of us.
Less guesswork in handoff
React and Tailwind, shared by both disciplines.
Cross-functional adoption
Marketing, brand, and social on the same toolset as product for the first time.
Reflection
The hard part wasn't the design work. It was the year of advocacy before it.
Design systems are infrastructure, and infrastructure is always easy to put off for the next feature. Learning to argue for it in terms leadership cared about, engineering velocity, handoff cost, roadmap capacity, is what unlocked the work.
The second lesson was knowing when to stop salvaging.
Three partial systems represented real effort by people I worked with, and the instinct is to honor that by building on top of it. Janell's audit gave us the evidence to make an unsentimental call. Starting fresh was faster than reconciling three sets of accumulated inconsistencies.
NED-Talks mattered as much as any component we built.
A design system nobody understands is just a file nobody opens. Treating adoption as its own design problem, with its own cadence, its own audience, its own feedback loop, is what turned NED from a deliverable into something teams reached for.