Six months after transitioning from Adobe XD to Figma, Millipore’s design system was already showing signs of strain. Leadership initially resisted updating the component library, but as new projects rolled in, designers were either reinventing components from scratch or breaking existing ones to fit their needs. This led to high-fidelity inconsistencies and additional work, ultimately slowing down the design and development process. Without a structured system, maintaining visual and functional coherence across the platform became an uphill battle.

The challenge was clear: we needed to establish a scalable, well-organized, and maintainable design system that would serve as a single source of truth for both designers and developers. However, since the system had already been in use for six months without governance, standardizing it retroactively was a massive undertaking.