The project began with the realisation of a need for standardised design and development components within Atlassian's administration app, specifically for Administration use-cases not covered by our primary design system.
The Administration app integrates across the entire Atlassian product suite, and as such had many contributor teams from all over the company – each doing their best to add to a cohesive whole, but lacking alignment on norms and existing functionality. As the capabilities and IA of the app continued to grow, more inconsistency in both interaction design and visual communication became apparent, and began surfacing in customer feedback.
Given that the rate of growth was only going to increase, there came a need to create a robust set of accessible components, unify design and development components, and improve the onboarding experience of our designers.
If this project was going to succeed, I needed to get buy-in from engineering and product management to invest in building shared patterns and components. Everyone agreed that coherence in our interface was desired (who wouldn't?), however there wasn't a clear narrative around the value of investing in making things that already exist more coherent, against other priorities that were focused on delivering capabilities that didn't exist at all. I started figuring out how to properly advocate for this work internally, focussing on two things: firstly, aligning designers on patterns and components and secondly, quantifying the problem in a way that related to broader strategy.
