Objective
11:11 Systems' product was, until recently, a set of internal tools with no real interface. Engineers interacted with infrastructure through a terminal, with no design layer and no product culture to speak of.
As the company grew through acquisitions, I was brought in to build not just screens, but the company's first design language and its first shared way of thinking about product. Starting from a blank page, leading remotely from France while working with engineering teams based in the US.
Process
There was nothing to build on: no UI, no design system, no product or design culture. The team was engineering-only, used to shipping infrastructure tools without design involved at all.
I started from scratch, defining the first design foundations: tokens for color, spacing, typography, motion. This effectively set the visual and interaction language for the entire company.
From there, I built and maintained a library of around 50 core components spanning several hundred screens, growing in step with the product suite. This wasn't a design system built for designers and handed to engineering afterward. It was built with the devs from day one:
Component architecture decided jointly with engineering, not imposed after the fact
Figma and React kept in parity as a shared responsibility, not a design-to-dev handoff
Naming, tokens, and structure shaped by what engineers could actually implement and maintain
Most of this happened remotely, across time zones, working primarily in English to align engineering teams based in the US, with no prior playbook to lean on.
As the design team grew to 5 people working across 18 products with roughly 20 engineers and 15 PMs, I introduced the practices that simply didn't exist yet: documentation, contribution guidelines, review workflows.
Outcome
Built the first product design language 11:11 Systems ever had, starting from a terminal with no interface and zero design culture. The system now underpins 18 products, used daily by 5 designers, 20 engineers, and 15 PMs across France and the US.
