Building a design system without a design team at Increase
Context
I joined Increase as their first designer during a critical growth phase. The company was preparing for a Series B round while expanding operations across Latin America. As part of the strategic team, I contributed the experience and impact perspective needed to secure investment and scale the business.
The product ecosystem was growing fast—8,000+ clients, 25,000+ subscriptions, processing over 20,000 transactions per hour across multiple web applications. But each application had evolved independently, resulting in fragmented experiences and inconsistent decisions.
There was no design team in place—and no shared foundation to build one.
My focus
Rather than starting by hiring, I focused on creating a system that could scale decisions before scaling people:
- ⦿Establish a shared visual and interaction language across products.
- ⦿Use craft and documentation as tools to align stakeholders and engineers.
- ⦿Introduce design as a strategic capability by demonstrating its business impact.
- ⦿Set the standards that would later guide the growth of the design team.
The system was intentionally built to be usable by non-designers, enabling product teams to move faster while improving consistency.
Outcome
The design system became the foundation for four products and enabled the company to scale without sacrificing quality. It also helped secure the budget to hire and grow a design team, raising the overall design maturity of the organization.
What started as a solo effort evolved into a shared standard — one that shaped how products were designed, built, and shipped at Increase.
