From Designing to Leading: My Leap to Heading a Design System

Context

I have been working at Caja Los Andes for over four years. It is one of Chile's leading social compensation funds, with millions of affiliates and a scale that forces you to think big from day one.

I arrived in November 2021 as an external consultant. Over time, I was hired internally in March 2023, and since then I have been part of multiple UX/UI cells, mostly in pairs, always focusing on UI. During that period, I participated in high-impact projects — including the complete redesign of Tapp, Caja Los Andes' prepaid card, an experience I could write a whole other article about.

It was precisely in that project where I discovered something important: I love designing components. Not just making them look good visually, but understanding the logic behind building them — how a good design decision can scale across all flows of a digital product.

At the end of that project phase, and as a senior designer, I joined a COE (Center of Excellence) team, from which I provided cross-functional consulting to other UX/UI teams and participated in experimental and ad-hoc demand projects. In parallel, I also took over the administration of Figma — the central tool in all the organization's experience teams — managing licenses, workspaces, and ensuring the team made the most of what the platform offers. I think I was assigned that role precisely because Figma is a tool I like a lot; I always try to stay up to date with every release, and that is reflected in how I leverage it at work.

The Moment

In September 2024, I was offered to cover for the Design System lead. It was a temporary cover — maternity and parental leave — but it represented something much bigger for me.

My first reaction was nervous. Impostor syndrome arrived on time, as always. But I looked at it from another angle: it was a real opportunity to grow, to see how I would do leading a team.

At first, it seemed manageable. "I just have to make sure the roadmap is met and the team is doing well," I thought. And in part, that was true. But soon I started looking into the deeper layers of the role: meetings with cells and technical leads, decisions that went beyond pure design, conversations where development knowledge mattered. I have basic programming notions, but it's not my strong suit — and learning to navigate that space was part of the challenge.

"There I learned something valuable: you don't need to know everything. Knowing who to rely on is also a way of leading."

Diving In

Gradually, I dove deeper into the design system libraries. I wanted to understand how they were built, what components existed, what opportunities for improvement there were. And there, my experience with Figma played to my advantage: I quickly noticed that many components were built in an outdated way, without taking advantage of the tool's latest features.

However, I didn't change everything immediately. I continued to respect the planning already established by the lead I was covering for. I resolved cells' doubts and addressed the issues they raised. There was an order to maintain.

Regarding the working methodology, we used Jira for tracking and Atomic Design as the approach to structure and scale components. To measure task complexity, we applied a Fibonacci scale: 1, 5, 8, and 13 points. A higher score meant greater complexity. This was important because we didn't measure ourselves by the number of completed tasks, but by the real weight of each one.

SLA Scheme

It makes perfect sense: a designer or developer could spend days working on a single complex component, like a top navigation menu, and that had to have a value proportional to its difficulty.

The First Real Problems

One of the first concrete obstacles I encountered was tracking within Jira. I know the tool well, but there was significant room to improve how it was configured and utilized within the team.

I addressed it directly: I established that all tasks must have clear context, a start date, a due date, and a completion date. Additionally, each task had to be correctly linked to its corresponding epic and well-scored according to the agreed scale. A simple change in appearance, but one that improved tracking considerably.

Meanwhile, something bigger was happening in parallel: a new general manager arrived at the company, bringing a major restructuring. Team rotations, moves to other areas, reorganizations.

In the midst of that restructuring, I officially took over as Design System Lead — no longer as a cover, but as the person responsible for the team.

A New Phase, A New Vision

Taking over the role permanently gave me something I didn't have before: the freedom to plan my own initiatives.

My goal was clear — to strengthen and evolve the design system — and to organize it, I defined four pillars to guide our work:

Order: Establish a solid and consistent foundation.
Optimize: Unlock the full potential of components and available tools.
Automate: Incorporate AI to streamline repetitive processes.
Deliver: Ensure the system is accessible and useful for all teams.

These pillars were not just conceptual. They translated into concrete initiatives: hygienic improvements that organized what was scattered, optimizations that modernized components that hadn't been updated in a while, and the first steps toward automating processes through AI implementations.

From that last line, something was born that deserves its own article: the development of a Figma plugin aimed at automating component documentation — one of the most repetitive and demanding tasks in building a design system. This, along with other AI solutions I have developed to streamline my workflows, has much more story to tell.

Final Reflection

When I look back, it is hard to recognize the designer who hesitated before accepting this role. Impostor syndrome has that trap: it makes you believe you need to be completely ready before taking the next step. But the reality is that no one starts a leadership role knowing everything. You learn by leading.

What did help me was having clarity on what I wanted to achieve, honesty about what I didn't know, and the willingness to lean on the team when necessary.

Leading is not about having all the answers — it is about knowing how to ask the right questions and creating the conditions for the team to do their best.