Design Infrastructure at Carbon6
Creating the operating layer for design across 16 companies acquired in 16 months.
Context
Carbon6 grew by acquisition, 16 companies in 16 months and 25+ Amazon-seller tools, and none of them brought a design team, the whole function was me and two other UX designers. Roughly half the portfolio arrived with nothing worth keeping, no current files, no design system, no sitemaps or flows, and as the company matured toward a sale people started asking what exists and why it was built this way, with nothing to point at.
My Role
Lead designer across the portfolio from 2022 through the SPS Commerce acquisition, directing two UX designers alongside my own IC work and absorbing each acquired product as it came in, and this one was my initiative start to finish, nobody assigned it to me.
Discovery & Research
I mapped the gap between what existed in the files, what existed in documentation, and what teams actually did day to day across the whole portfolio, and the pattern was consistent even though every product was broken in its own way. That mapping is what let me argue the problem was structural rather than 25 separate messes.
What I Built
The operating layer, the things that crossed products rather than living inside one, a single source of truth in Figma and Confluence for every product, the first design philosophy for the brand as a set, a unified design system, and the missing sitemaps, journeys and flows for 10+ products that had never had them. All of it built as standards and templates, so each new acquisition could be absorbed against a template instead of from scratch.
Confluence guide
The “Best Figma Practices” page — file and page organisation, one file per feature, naming conventions. Shared standards, centrally documented, with release notes.
What Was Hard
Getting the system agreed was not the hard part, the gaps were obvious enough that anyone who had been asked an unanswerable question already agreed with me. The hard part came back every time a product arrived, not every tool in a 25 product suite deserves the same design investment (some strategic, some in maintenance, some bought for a customer list), and with no formula and no mandate I had to make that call each time and then defend it.
Components in the style guide
Chart components in the shared style guide, with their size and state variants. Reusable patterns, faster delivery.
What Happened
Absorbing a newly acquired product went from months to weeks, onboarding a new designer stopped depending on me being in the room, and product and engineering adopted the Confluence and Figma layer as the source of truth for design. The documentation answered questions during diligence when somebody finally asked, and Carbon6 was acquired by SPS Commerce for $210M, announced January 2025 and closed February 2025.
A feature against the templates
A redesigned SPS Commerce onboarding step built against the shared templates. Clear workflows, scalable design.
Want a full walkthrough?
Let's talk, I would love to show you how it actually works!