Design leadership / Strategy / Systems
I build and lead design teams, shape product strategy, and create the systems that help organizations deliver exceptional work at scale.
What changed in each organization, shown, not told.
Decisioning and analytics platforms, 2025 to present
Set enterprise design-system strategy and shared governance, aligning teams around accessibility, consistent implementation, and responsible AI-assisted delivery.
24 products, from marketing to every legacy product, on one AI and accessibility standard.
Global athletic apparel retail
Led a multidisciplinary team turning spreadsheet-based processes into digital tools, cutting the average cost sheet from six weeks to four days without interrupting delivery.
Mobile-first consumer fintech
Built a design team from zero, created its career ladder and working practices, and led it through three product feature deliveries during the pandemic.
Identity platform for developers and IT
Led designers and design operations through an acquisition, building adoption and preparing complex enterprise products for future integration.
Earlier: led design integration through acquisitions at Mission Lane, an 11-person team on an enterprise proof of concept at Slalom, and an eight-person, multi-agency team on T-Mobile’s Fuse 1.0 design system at Avanade.
Great design happens when people have the clarity, trust, and infrastructure to do their best work.
My career has moved between two complementary disciplines: leading design teams, and building the systems that help them succeed.
After more than six years leading design teams, I made a deliberate move in early 2022 to deepen my expertise in design systems architecture and operations. I wanted to understand not just how to lead great designers, but how to create the foundations that help entire organizations design better.
I kept leading throughout that transition, bringing people development, strategic direction, and cross-functional leadership into increasingly complex technical environments.
That shapes how I lead today. I give teams autonomy within clear expectations, make room for individual growth, and build practices that make quality repeatable rather than dependent on individual heroics.
My goal is to build organizations where great design happens consistently, not just when the right people are in the room.
I build teams with clear expectations, room to grow, and shared ownership of quality. From hiring and career development to establishing design practices, I set designers up to do their best work.
I connect design strategy to the infrastructure that makes it sustainable: governance, tools, standards, contribution models, and adoption across teams. Systems I’ve led have supported more than 50 product teams.
I help organizations adopt AI thoughtfully, connecting faster experimentation to human judgment, accessibility, quality standards, and scalable delivery.
I lead design where technical constraints, regulation, and organizational complexity intersect, turning difficult problems into coherent product experiences.
Want to see the craft behind this? kirsten.systems is the hands-on companion: the FICO system in depth, with components, tokens, and governance you can explore.