Technologies
Led the creation of an enterprise mortgage design system and kept distributed teams aligned.
Overview
At ICE Mortgage Technology, I was bridging the gap between clunky old desktop apps and the modern web. I wasn't just coding; I was leading a team and defining the architecture for a massive fintech ecosystem.
Challenges
- Legacy Weight: Moving heavy, data-dense desktop interfaces to the web is hard. You can't just copy-paste.
- Fragmentation: Dozens of teams were building different parts of the platform, and it looked like a Franken-UI.
- Accessibility: This is mortgage tech; it had to be accessible (WCAG) and legally compliant.
- Herding Cats: getting distributed teams to agree on a standard way of doing things.
Solution
The Design System: I architected a library of React components. We're not just talking buttons; I built complex, data-driven modules like interactive charts and massive data tables that could handle thousands of rows.
Accessibility First: We didn't bolt accessibility on at the end. It was a requirement from line one of code.
Standardization: I worked with UX and Product to break these huge projects into smaller MVPs so we could actually ship something.
Results
- A Unified Look: We finally had a consistent UI across multiple flagship products.
- Faster Dev: Once the components were built, teams could drag-and-drop instead of reinventing the wheel.
- Higher Quality: The component library was tested thoroughly, so we had fewer bugs in the UI layer.
