Three product experiences. One design system. 40+ designers.

The client is one of the world's largest technology distributors — the commerce and logistics layer between technology manufacturers and the businesses that buy their products. When they set out to build a full B2B marketplace, the scope was significant: a platform that would need to serve three fundamentally different types of users, all on the same underlying system.

The businesses purchasing technology — the customers — needed a procurement experience. The technology companies selling through the platform — the vendors — needed tools to list products, manage their catalog, and understand performance. And the client's own internal associates, sitting in the middle managing relationships on both sides, needed a different set of capabilities entirely.

Three user types. Three product surfaces. One platform.

The agency was brought in on the strength of prior supplier-facing experience work for a major retailer — a similar challenge at a different scale. That referral meant we came in with relevant context and a baseline of trust. We started building immediately.

I held two concurrent leadership roles on this engagement.

I led the design team responsible for the vendor-facing surface — the experience used by technology companies to manage their presence on the marketplace. That meant understanding a user type with a very different relationship to the platform than the customers buying from them: vendors are operating a business through this infrastructure, not just shopping on it. Their needs are operational — catalog management, pricing, performance visibility, relationship management with the associate team. I led that team from early concept through to a production-ready design.

On the associate surface — the tooling used by the internal team managing relationships across the platform — my involvement was at the strategy layer. I contributed to product strategy and definition, and developed recommendations for the implementation approach. Three surfaces sharing one platform means decisions on one affect the others; having direct involvement in the associate strategy ensured the vendor experience I was designing wasn't being built in isolation from the internal tools that would sit alongside it.

Running concurrently, I led the design system team and owned governance for the system across all three product surfaces. This is where the real complexity lived. A design system that serves one product is a component library with some documentation. A design system that has to serve three distinct products — built for three different user types, with three different interaction patterns and business contexts — is an architectural challenge. Components need to be flexible enough to work across surfaces that don't look alike, without becoming so abstract they stop being useful to anyone. Decisions made for the vendor experience ripple into the customer experience and the associate tools. Governance isn't optional at that scale — without it, three teams making independent decisions on shared components is how a system fragments.

I built the system and put the governance structure in place to keep it coherent: the processes, the decision rights, and the operating model for how three design teams working across three product surfaces stayed aligned on one shared foundation.

A production vendor experience for technology vendors managing their catalog, pricing, and performance on the marketplace. Production associate tooling for the internal team managing supplier and customer relationships. A production procurement experience for the businesses buying technology through the marketplace. And a unified design system governing all three surfaces, with more than 40 designers working under it.

Three distinct product experiences, one shared foundation, all in production. 3,203 hours of design work across just over two years.