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Design Systems & Handoff

Digital Maturity in a Wholesale Organization

September 20, 2024 11:10 AM
Long Lecture
🇬🇧 English
Wisła

About

When you think of PUMA, you might think of our Suedes or an Olympic sprinter winning gold wearing a pair of PUMA spikes. What typically doesn't come to mind is the small team building digital products within the company. In this talk, I'll share the beginnings and foundations of how our DesignOps and Design Systems practice is connecting people, products, and processes.

Talk by

Photo of Stuart Wainstock, DesignOps & Design Systems at PUMA
Stuart Wainstock
DesignOps & Design Systems at PUMA

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From the recording

Talk in brief

At WaysConf 2024, Stuart Wainstock, DesignOps and Design Systems Lead at PUMA, shares how a large, historically physical-product-focused wholesale enterprise is navigating its early-stage digital product maturity. To address a highly decentralized digital footprint consisting of over 50 web shops across five platforms, Wainstock's team initiated a series of foundational changes centered on people, processes, and collaboration. By remixing established industry frameworks, they launched four key initiatives: an eight-month design system pilot, structured product management portfolios mapped to the consumer journey, clarified roles and responsibilities based on user experience stacks, and a defined team offering menu spanning product, process, and people. Wainstock emphasizes that driving digital maturity in a legacy organization is a marathon rather than a sprint, requiring continuous relationship-building, proactive communication, and small, consistent behavioral shifts to achieve lasting business outcomes.

Key takeaways

  1. 01

    Equal Partnership in Design Systems

    A successful design system must treat product design and product engineering as equal partners rather than letting one discipline dominate. This collaborative approach ensures the system acts as a neutral enablement service that supports the entire organization.

    Watch from 13:14
  2. 02

    Treating Systems as Products

    Design systems should be treated as internal products that require dedicated funding, resources, and continuous evolution. They must be managed with the same care as consumer-facing applications to truly benefit the internal makers who use them.

    Watch from 14:32
  3. 03

    Structuring Portfolios Around the Consumer Journey

    Organizing product management portfolios around specific stages of the consumer journey—such as discovery, conversion, and checkout—helps clarify ownership. This structure allows teams to better prioritize projects based on global business impact and regional needs.

    Watch from 19:40
  4. 04

    Demarcating Roles via the UX Stack

    Legacy organizations can reduce friction by clearly separating user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design roles. Mapping responsibilities to different layers of the product stack helps stakeholders understand where each practitioner should focus their efforts.

    Watch from 23:01
  5. 05

    Managing Breaking Changes with Hyper-Care

    When upgrading design system components that might negatively impact live products, teams should enter a temporary period of hyper-care. Dedicated support during these updates helps resolve breaking changes quickly and keeps production files stable.

    Watch from 31:37
Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

The Duality of Physical and Digital Maturity

PUMA possesses an incredibly high level of maturity in the physical product space, having designed high-performance gear for elite athletes for over 75 years. However, when it comes to digital products, the organization is still at the beginning of its journey. While consumers might associate digital product maturity with Silicon Valley giants, PUMA actually operates a massive digital footprint with over 50 web shops on five different platforms. The challenge lies in bringing the same level of operational maturity and structured design processes found in physical manufacturing over to the rapidly evolving digital product landscape.

Watch from 4:34

The Explore, Refine, and Document Framework

During the design system pilot, the team adopted an agile "explore, refine, and document" framework to remain nimble under uncertain budget constraints. The workflow consisted of five distinct phases: exploring through UI audits and technical specs, prototyping early drafts in Figma for quick iteration, implementing react components using Chromatic and Storybook, conducting thorough QA testing, and continuously documenting the patterns. This structured approach ensured that the team focused on delivering high-value components to production rather than merely creating a static UI kit that developers could not easily adopt.

Watch from 15:24

Balancing Global Priorities with Regional Needs

Using Jira Product Discovery, the product management team mapped out ideas against key performance indicators and regional requests, utilizing an internal value calculator to estimate business impact. By visualizing effort and impact, they were able to assign clear priority badges to incoming projects. This framework allowed the global team to have objective, structured conversations with regional business leaders, ensuring that resources were not diverted to highly localized projects that failed to move the needle for the broader global organization.

Watch from 21:25

Simplifying the Product Stack for Stakeholders

To prevent business stakeholders from becoming overwhelmed by complex information architecture diagrams, the team remixed Jesse James Garrett's classic elements of user experience. They mapped roles directly to different layers of the product stack, showing that product managers own the abstract strategy and scope, UX designers handle the structural skeleton and information architecture, and UI and design system teams focus on the visual surface. This visual simplification helped non-technical partners understand that design is a multi-layered process rather than just a superficial layer of paint applied at the end of development.

Watch from 23:20

Continuous Documentation and Team Sizing

Responding to questions about the pilot's execution, Wainstock clarified that documentation was not a chore left entirely for the end of the project; instead, light documentation occurred continuously throughout the entire development cycle. He also revealed that the initial design system pilot was executed by a remarkably lean team of just five people: two dedicated product designers, two product engineers, and Wainstock acting as the product manager. This small, cross-functional unit proved that a highly focused group can establish foundational design system pipelines without requiring massive initial headcount.

Watch from 32:03
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