Leading the rollout of Jira's design system to improve product quality and speed up design workflows.
I led the development and rollout of the Jira UI Kit, a shared Figma library of 341 components that achieved 704k+ total inserts and 98% design token adoption across the organisation. The kit streamlined design processes for 63 teams, significantly improving consistency at scale. Beyond the library, I built a Jira Replit template that was used by thousands of employees across the org, including Replit themselves during a company-wide AI Builders Week, earning direct recognition from the company president and leadership.
As Jira moved toward product consolidation, design teams faced a critical challenge: maintaining consistency and quality across independent product areas without slowing teams down. I led the work to establish the Jira UI Kit as a single source of truth in Figma - a practical, shared resource that gave designers a reliable foundation while preserving the autonomy they needed to move fast. This required not only building a component library but also designing the governance model, defining contribution workflows, earning leadership alignment, and building enough trust that teams would choose the kit over maintaining their own local variants.
Before consolidation, Jira had no single source of truth for design. Separate kits existed for Jira Work Management (Business), Jira Software, and Open tool chain, with teams also borrowing patterns from Confluence. Every team maintained its own components, made its own calls on interaction patterns, and wrote its own documentation. This meant designers duplicated work constantly, shipping experiences that felt inconsistent across the product, and there was no single place to go when you wanted to understand how Jira should feel.
The deeper challenge was trust. A centralised kit only works if teams believe it solves their problems better than whatever they've already built. If the shared library felt slow or out of date, teams would go back to using their local versions. The goal was to build something so practical and credible that adoption became the path of least resistance, something so useful that using it was just the obvious choice.
I approached the work as both a system building and change management problem. The library itself needed to be strong, but the operating model around it mattered just as much. I partnered with a fellow designer to drive the initiative forward.
A shared kit fails without leadership buy-in. I ran cross-team syncs with design leads and principals to build alignment on the problem and vision. I also created a business case highlighting how the fragmentation slowed design velocity, created customer-facing inconsistency, and meant duplicated work across teams. Once leadership was on board, support followed.
We based the architecture of the kit on the existing Atlassian Design System. The structure prioritised components teams actually used in shipping features e.g. buttons, inputs, modals, key screens. We tried to organise the kit around real workflows: how designers searched for components, customised them, and applied them to their own work.
To ensure the kit didn’t go stale, I designed a model that distributed ownership by recruiting designers already working on active features to contribute their components straight from their work. A shared backlog made ownership clear, templates kept things consistent, and a lightweight maintenance process meant the kit could grow without becoming anyone's full-time job.
Designers knew the kit existed, but contributing to it felt like unfamiliar territory, so I ran a design sprint to change that. Authors got hands-on with the contribution model, worked through components from their own features, and left equipped to champion it. Carving out dedicated time also meant components actually got built. Confidence in both Figma and the kit's approach jumped from 4.5 to 6 out of 7, and the contributor pool grew.
Before broader rollout, we ran moderated usability testing on the new Jira UI Kit library in Figma to evaluate whether it suited makers' ways of working, met the target usability benchmark of an SEQ score of at least 5.5, and exposed areas for improvement.
We recruited 5 to 6 participants across business and software library users and asked them to complete representative tasks such as finding templates and components, creating a flow, and customising an existing component. The research confirmed that the overall direction was strong, while also surfacing specific usability issues in naming, examples, and guidance.
The Jira UI Kit became a foundational resource across the company. It consolidated reusable components, tokens, patterns, and guidance into one source of truth.
The library of 341 components grew to reach 704k+ total inserts with 98% design token adoption. The kit streamlined design processes for makers, growing from 26 teams at launch to 63 teams, with consistent active reuse and faster iteration cycles across the organisation. Ready-made examples increased by 272.5% to 756, demonstrating the value of practical, focused guidance.
| Metric | Launch | Current | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team adoption | 26 teams | 63 teams | +142% |
| Weekly component inserts | 3.9k+ | 704k+ | +2,533% |
| Library maturity | 341 components | 511 components | +50% |
| Design token usage | 18% | 98% | #1 in org |
Adoption metrics: Launch to current
To push the UI kit even further, I built a Jira Replit template using the kit as the design foundation, making it easy for non-tech employees across the company to create Jira prototypes. I also authored documentation and training materials to support adoption.
During the company-wide AI Builders Week, this template became a critical resource adopted by thousands of builders internally, and used by Replit themselves during demoes. The template earned recognition from the company president for enabling rapid prototyping and demonstrating the value of structured design systems in developer tools. This outcome showed the UI kit's true power: it wasn't just a tool for designers, but a foundation that could accelerate work across disciplines.
Recreation of the Jira Replit template due to access issues with the original