Pega Design System
2022-2023
Client
Pega
Pega Design System
Co-creating a component library from the ground up during a Sketch-to-Figma migration
Role
Team
The Challenge
When I joined Pega in early 2022, the design team was still working primarily in Sketch. The timing was fortunate – the organization had just acquired Figma licenses, and our department became the first to fully adopt it.
This transition presented an opportunity: we decided to build a design system from scratch – one that faithfully represented the existing Pega application while introducing the structure, consistency, and scalability that had been missing in old Sketch libraries.
The challenge was to capture the existing application’s UI faithfully and to build it in a way that scales – with nested components, variants, and parameters that would make the system genuinely useful for the team.
Process
Building Component Complexity
Over the first six months, we progressively increased the sophistication of our components. What started as basic buttons and form fields evolved into deeply nested components with multiple variants and configurable parameters — reflecting the real complexity of the Pega platform.
Cross-team Adoption
Our department’s early success with the system caught the attention of other teams. We shared our approach, documented patterns, and collaborated with designers from other departments who were starting their own Figma transition.
Handoff & Scaling
After about a year of active development, the design system was mature enough to be handed off to a dedicated team that maintains and evolves it to this day. The fact that it’s still in use and actively maintained is the strongest validation of the foundation we built.
