Popular Bank's product surfaces had drifted. Different teams shipped different patterns, and Association Banking, the platform serving the bank's member associations, carried the inconsistency into experiences that real customers used to move real money. There was no shared system holding it together, and no single owner accountable for making one.

I was brought in as Senior Product Designer. I owned the design system across the bank and managed a team of two designers, setting the direction they worked against and mentoring them as they grew into it. My job was not to draw every screen. It was to decide what "consistent" meant here, and to get a room full of stakeholders who did not report to me to agree to it and build against it.

I chose to evolve the system rather than rebuild it. I anchored the new direction to a recent brand redesign, then took the existing base-level design system and extended it, layering atomic elements throughout so the system grew from what teams already used instead of replacing it wholesale. It kept the work grounded in reality and gave every team a consistent foundation to build on.

I ran the stakeholder alignment directly. The Association Banking group, which serves condo and HOA boards nationwide, pushed to keep a separate visual identity. Part of it was audience, arguing their specialist clients expected it, but most of it was inertia: they had run the same playbook for years and did not see what a unified system bought them. I made the case in their terms, not mine. The new brand needed to hold across every vertical to rebuild trust in a site that had drifted for five years, and because their content patterns mirrored the retail verticals, extending the system to their pages cost their team almost nothing. Leadership agreed. Association Banking kept its dedicated domain, but its redesign was brought into the unified system.

The system became the reference other teams built from, and the redesign moved the behavior that mattered. In Microsoft Clarity, average time on site rose 7%, and customers came back more often. The unified experience held attention where the fragmented site had lost it, which was the whole case for consistency in the first place.