As your organization grows, and grows and grows, you may find things start to look a little disjointed, almost as if they were created by different teams at different companies. This was the case at VMware a few years back, as they noticed products just weren’t lining up, even on a basic level. To create cohesion, a small team set out to develop a consistent look and feel with standardized micro interactions.

Fast forward to today, and the outcome of these efforts is Clarity, VMware’s fully open source design system. From a small project in the corner of VMware’s engineering organization, Clarity has evolved into one of the company’s most foundational UI projects. Jehad Affoneh, Sr. Director, Head of Design at VMware, has been working on Clarity through it all. Starting out at VMware as an engineer, Jahed today leads design globally across most of the company.

Like many internal projects, Clarity started out underfunded, with just a few people working on it. But it soon took off and continues to make strides. Jehad reflects on lessons learned, sharing strategies to help pull off a design system project of your own. He also speaks to ways design leaders can build credibility across the organization and how the role is really about designing for your team, the business and the user at an end-to-end level.