Got the Ball Rolling on a Long-Stagnant Reskinning Project

Quarters ago, the Design team had provided beautiful mocks of a site redesign, with the goal of unifying the look and feel of the Pilot platform. Sadly, these designs were laying  dormant.

This is because typically, a "design system" engineering team owns the effort, but Pilot has no such team. Our frontend engineers are decentralized on separate teams, with feature work being their main priority. To achieve this makeover, work had to be broken down into small chunks such that any product engineer could grab whenever they had a few hours to spare. We also wanted the work to ship iteratively and right away.

In Figma, I edited Design's reskin wireframes to imagine some "intermediary" aesthetic states that would allow the site to look visually coherent while engineers revamped pages one by one.

Garnering interest and approval through sharing my Figma file around with a proposal document, several frontend engineers got together to convert some pages. We found the page conversion experience was quick and safe (repetitive CSS changes no risk of breaking functionality). With some working intermediary-reskinned pages, we presented some screenshots to a designer, who gave us the green light. We proceeded to push these pages to prod as quick and highly visible wins for the reskin project.

Through this engineer-designer collaboration, we had a plan that was safe (no scary, all-or-nothing merges) and compatible with our design/ engineering capacity constraints.