Building Gex:
A Lean, Scalable Design System
A Framework for Alignment and Collaboration
The Problem
When I joined IPG as the Director of Product Design, there were no design systems in place across any of our products. Pet Cloud, our main app, was originally built to serve a single brand. But as IPG grew, so did our need to support multiple brands, onboard hundreds of thousands of new customers, and accelerate feature development.
The problem? Every new page or feature required either a net-new design or a copy-paste job from previous screens. The result was a mess: inconsistencies everywhere, constant custom dev work, wasted time, and mounting frustration from designers and developers alike.
We needed to simplify.
We only need 1 button…
The Name
Every good design system has a name, so we got to work. What started as a lighthearted suggestion quickly turned into something we all loved. We landed on Gex, named after the beloved dog of one of our most designers. It was simple, memorable, and brought a personal touch to a system that was otherwise all about structure and scalability. The name gave our team a sense of ownership and identity, and it stuck.
The Goals
We set out to build a system that was:
Simple: minimal, atomic, and practical
Consistent: standardized across teams and brands
Scalable: flexible enough to support growth and change
Fast: dramatically reduce design and development time
We asked questions like: What’s the smallest number of components we can use to build a functional, beautiful app? What problems does this component actually need to solve? Can this pattern support multiple use cases or just one?
That exercise got us down to about 20 core components.
We weren’t trying to show off. We were relentlessly focused on efficiency.
Our Approach
1. Educating the Team
I knew that for this to work, we all needed to be speaking the same language. I led the effort to bring everyone up to speed on design systems by enrolling incoming designers in Dive Club's Figma Academy. This gave us a strong, shared foundation and built trust in the process and the toolset from the beginning.
2. Auditing Everything
I kicked off the discovery process with a full audit of every UI component in the app. I led the team through screenshots, design files, and live examples to break things down into patterns and problem areas. From there, I worked with them to ideate and define what components we actually needed, not just what we had.
3. Defining Our Principles
Early on, I created a set of product design principles to guide the system’s architecture and usage. These principles shaped how we approached every decision and have since been adopted more broadly across the organization. I go deeper into these principles in this case study.
4. Building in the Open
We designed Gex in Figma over the course of about two months, intentionally keeping the work open and visible. Our team hosted design reviews with engineering and shared progress with leadership to maintain alignment. Leading up to this, I spent a lot of time pitching the concept internally, making the case for the system, and ultimately securing buy-in from our CTO. This obviously made implementation much smoother.
5. Shipping Incrementally
Because we didn’t have a dedicated front-end team for this work, I directed a phased rollout that fit into our existing roadmap. I coordinated with engineering on a project-by-project basis, identifying opportunities to replace legacy UI with system components as we built out new features or migrated brands. It wasn’t always clean, but it was the most realistic path given the size of our team and the volume of work.
Challenges We Faced
Limited resources: We couldn’t pull an entire team off to focus on system work full time.
Piecemeal implementation: Engineering had to adopt the system gradually, which slowed rollout.
Lack of documentation: We didn’t document enough early on something we’re still improving on.
Small team, big demand: The volume of design work across our brands meant Gex needed to work hard and fast.
Outcomes and Impact
Gex delivered. Big time.
Design and development time for new features dropped drastically
When we outsource design work to offshore teams, they are able to deliver high-quality, on-brand work using Gex
Adoption spread across marketing, product, and the dev team
The Ripple Effect
Gex didn’t just improve Pet Cloud.
It reshaped how we approach design across the entire organization.
After launching the system, I led efforts to apply the same principles of simplification and scalability to other key areas. We created several additional systems tailored to different needs, from lightweight component libraries for marketing landing pages to more robust systems for high-impact products.
One of the more significant impacts was for our Quote and Enrollment (Q&E) sites, which support nine distinct brands. These sites are some of the most visible and complex in our ecosystem, with redesigns historically taking 6 to 12 months due to the layers of compliance, legal review, and cross-functional sign-off.
By developing a brand-flexible design system for Q&E, we cut that timeline down to just 4 weeks of design and 60 days of development — a 75% reduction. That change didn’t just improve efficiency, it freed up our small team to focus on strategy and innovation, not just execution.
Gex became a blueprint. It inspired a more systemized, thoughtful way of working across product, design, and engineering and showed the business how design can scale sustainably.
What I Learned
When we started, I expected a boost in efficiency.
What I didn’t expect was this level of transformation.
We created systems that empowered our small team to scale its impact far beyond what would’ve been possible otherwise. What I’m most proud of though, is the internal culture shift. New products are being spun up by leadership and engineering with design system requirements baked in from day one.
People outside the design org are advocating for quality, consistency, and scalability. We created evangelists. That’s how I know the work stuck.
What's Next
Gex continues to evolve, but we stick to our product principles and mantra of relentless simplification. New components are rare and intentional. We only add something if it solves multiple problems.
Other teams have followed suit, and now we’ve got a constellation of systems supporting everything from marketing to insurance quotes.
And it all started with a very good dog named Gex.