I've never seen a project go so smoothly. Three developers, one fractional head of design, six weeks, virtually no production bugs. No heroics, no overtime — just a solid plan: constrain the problem, hand-craft the building blocks, and let an LLM safely do the manual labour.
The pitch
The app worked, it was simple, users even called it idiot-proof, but to be fair it didn't do all that much. None of us were really proud of it. The design wasn't consistent anywhere, each feature built with the design system du jour. The latest, a complete design system, with every level and every page accounted for and built to the brand spec, was just sitting on a shelf quietly going mouldy from lack of use.
We had bold plans for new features, the kind meant to put us ahead of the competition, but there was nowhere good to put them. We could squeeze them in somewhere, sure, but it's hard to go to market with new features squished into an ill-fitting and inconsistent design.
To address both of these issues, our fractional head of design pitched a full app refresh: our existing unadopted design system but elevated with a clear vision of the future.
