Greetings, I’m Brad. I lead global enterprise product design teams in delivering experiences at scale that eclipse user expectations and drive business value.
Throughout my career I’ve enjoyed much success growing and leading design organizations, driving business and process transformation, and delivering market-leading product at scale.
If you’re interested in learning more about myself and my work, don’t hesitate to reach out. Many thanks ✌🏽
Research
Partnering with our research team, we crafted a comprehensive study to produce the insights we sought. We planned, ran and reported a study in six weeks, using four sources so no single one could mislead us.
42 Surveys
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24 designers and 19 engineers rated satisfaction and friction, component by component.
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24 designers and 19 engineers rated satisfaction and friction, component by component.
23 Observation Sessions
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Designers walked through real projects; engineers built from Figma live.
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Designers walked through real projects; engineers built from Figma live.
14 Leaders
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Product, sales and engineering leaders on the system's business value.
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Product, sales and engineering leaders on the system's business value.
299 Support Requests
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Recurring themes from Slack and office hours.
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Recurring themes from Slack and office hours.
Inshights
We quickly learned Unify had multiple unique challenges across different users. Users liked Unify – 75% of designers and 79% of engineers were satisfied with it – but the problems were real anyway, and they fell into three groups.
Flexibility
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Designers felt Unify was too rigid and too loose at the same time. Data grids, lists and menus didn't flex for dense financial workflows, so designers detached half of the complex components. And with no page templates, teams kept making the same layout decisions and landing on different answers every time.
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Designers felt Unify was too rigid and too loose at the same time. Data grids, lists and menus didn't flex for dense financial workflows, so designers detached half of the complex components. And with no page templates, teams kept making the same layout decisions and landing on different answers every time.
Drift
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Design and code were drifting apart. Names didn't match between Figma and code, and components could do things in Figma they couldn't do in code. Prop lists were buried. Designers and engineers were working from different sources of truth, and engineers wrote custom overrides to close the gap.
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Design and code were drifting apart. Names didn't match between Figma and code, and components could do things in Figma they couldn't do in code. Prop lists were buried. Designers and engineers were working from different sources of truth, and engineers wrote custom overrides to close the gap.
Value
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57% of stakeholders received no formal updates on Unify, and 60% were neutral on whether it had helped their team, thus they couldn’t discern if using it was delivering value. Leaders only met the system when something broke, so it read as a hurdle rather than the accelerator it could be.
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57% of stakeholders received no formal updates on Unify, and 60% were neutral on whether it had helped their team, thus they couldn’t discern if using it was delivering value. Leaders only met the system when something broke, so it read as a hurdle rather than the accelerator it could be.
"Be more prescriptive. We can wait for patterns to emerge organically or we can prescribe them."
A Workiva designer, asked what would help most
A Workiva designer, asked what would help most
On top of everything else, AI made every one of these problems bigger. An agent can only follow rules that are written down, so every gap in Unify became a gap it filled with guesses.
Engineers were already using AI agents, and leadership expected AI to make every screen cheaper to build. Missing documentation and mismatched names, problems people had learned to work around, were exactly what tripped the AI up.
Strategy
With challenges mounting, and AI compounding them, it was clear we needed to approach evolving Unify holistically. In January 2026 my engineering partner and I crafted a plan to redesign and recode Unify. In doing so we engaged an external partner to help accelerate our efforts. Across eight sprints we would partner to build the new foundation for our evolved Unify Design System.
The timing was uniquely in our favor to redesign as we could modernize the look and feel of Unify at the same time our corporate rebrand was in development. I took the opportunity to partner closely with Marketing to ensure there was a clear connection between brand and product.
The new design fed into engineering as well. Underneath our new system would sit a rebuilt token architecture and machine-readable contracts for every component, pattern and template: the rules written down, which is what designers, engineers and AI agents all need to produce consistently high quality, composable UI’s.
01
More flexibility
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Variables, slots, patterns and template
More flexibility
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Variables, slots, patterns and template
02
Built For AI
— Context that both people and coding assistants can read.
Built For AI
— Context that both people and coding assistants can read.
03
One Source Of Truth
— Names, props and behavior match in design and code.
One Source Of Truth
— Names, props and behavior match in design and code.
04
Prescriptive Docs
— Real usage scenarios, so nobody guesses how complex components fit together.
Prescriptive Docs
— Real usage scenarios, so nobody guesses how complex components fit together.
05
Regular Updates
— For leaders and the community, so Unify reads as an accelerator.
Regular Updates
— For leaders and the community, so Unify reads as an accelerator.
Every part of Unify now starts from one contract: a single spec for each component that defines its API, variants, states, token bindings, accessibility and the overrides teams are allowed to make. Figma, code and Storybook are all built from it and kept in step.
Tokens in three tiers: Primitives feed semantic tokens, which feed component tokens. A brand change happens once, at the right tier, and flows through everything.
Checked on every build: An evaluation script runs in CI and flags hard-coded values, accessibility issues, and any drift between the contract, the code and Figma.
Readable by AI: The same contracts reach AI tools through the Unify MCP server and Code Connect, so agents build from the rules instead of guessing.
Outcomes In Progress
The adoption number taught us something on its own. Much of the growth came from a company-wide move to TypeScript, which showed where Unify was used but not whether products were consistent. That's why detachment, not adoption, is the number I most want to move.
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