Case study · Walgreens Boots Alliance · Principal UX/UI Design Manager
How I built a 12-person design team at Walgreens and got a design system funded
- Problem
- Four product teams building pharmacy software, each with its own screens. The apps didn't feel like one product, and developers kept rebuilding parts that already existed.
- What I did
- Built the visual design team from scratch, ran it on a capacity rule, and won funding for a shared design system by putting a price on doing nothing.
- Result
- A team of 12 and a funded design system with its own manager and build team. The business case modeled about $6.4 million a year in lost time.
- My role
- Principal UX/UI Design Manager. I hired every designer. A director held the design system budget.
The $6.4 million is the business case I built to win funding, not measured savings.
The problem
Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal program had four product teams building pharmacy software. Each one built its own screens, so the apps didn't feel like one product, and developers kept rebuilding parts that already existed somewhere else.
My role
Walgreens UX was split into three disciplines: user experience, visual design, and research. I was given visual design to build. I ran every interview, hire, and onboarding. A director controlled the design system budget, and a scrum team in Argentina built and tested the components.
What I tried first
I started with the team. I wrote a hiring bar for phone screens: responsive design, being able to explain your process, agile experience alongside UX designers, prototyping tools, and brand guidelines. Front-end code was a plus, not a requirement. Senior designers became the go-to experts for their product areas, reviewing junior work and mentoring. We grew from 2 designers to 12.
The design system was harder. In September 2018 we took a roadshow to the whole program and showed the inconsistencies screen by screen. Everyone agreed with it. Nothing got scheduled. It had no owner and no estimate, so it never made it into a backlog.
What changed
So I put a price on doing nothing. I estimated the time lost to redlines and rebuilt components at about five hours a week, for 40 designers at $50 an hour and 300 developers at $75 an hour. That's about $520,000 a year in design time and $5.85 million in development time, almost $6.4 million in all. Saving even an hour a day would be worth that much.
The number gave each group its own reason to say yes. Product teams got time back, developers got less rework, and leadership saw a cost they were already paying. The system got funded, with a dedicated design system manager and the team in Argentina behind it.
What we delivered
- In the first funded year: one repository under version control in place of per-team copies, a backlog and workflow for component requests, a secure documentation site, a first round of quality engineering, and a basic accessibility checklist.
- The Renewal illustration standard and the product branding that gave the four apps one look.
- A capacity rule to keep the team from overcommitting. Every initiative was sized as a share of capacity, with no more than three running at once and only one extra-large. We held scheduled wall reviews instead of status meetings, so product and engineering could see the work.
Grant taught us to communicate with all Domains to build one system, but not separated parts.
Visual Designer on my team · Rx Renewal Program, 2019
Renewal was still in development when I left, so I can't claim its effect on pharmacy staff.
What I'd do differently
Because Renewal didn't reach users while I was there, I now split every designer's goals between product results and their own growth. A designer doesn't control whether a product ships, and their review shouldn't depend on it.