ANZ Bank is a 40,000-person global organisation with over 200 designers and 2,000+ front-end developers in its retail division alone.
I kicked off the ANZ Design System five years ago; right as the bank kicked off a complete digital transformation—rebuilding its entire core product lineup and undergoing its first rebrand in decades, the biggest in it’s century old history.
Becoming the bank's first
Head of Design Systems
As the system grew from side-of-desk experiment to critical infrastructure, ANZ formalised my role as Head of Design Systems. I led a cross-discipline enablement team across design, iOS, Android and Web—responsible for the system’s architecture, quality, contribution pathways, release cadence and platform parity.
I stayed deeply hands-on in the craft while aligning design, engineering and brand so that using the system became the easiest and most trusted way to ship.
Team Summary
3 System Squads
5 Designers (direct reports)
8 Engineers
Daily releases
This timeline isn’t every task I touched—it’s the major milestones that show how the system grew from a scrappy safety net into the backbone of ANZ’s digital delivery. From the first iOS and Android libraries, through full template suites and code parity, to forming a dedicated enablement team and being formally appointed Head of Design Systems, each year built on the last in a deliberate, measured way.
Most teams don’t start from raw components—they start from real screens. So instead of stopping at patterns, we built comprehensive template libraries for common flows like onboarding, authentication and feature discovery. Each set is mirrored across iOS, Android and Web, with best-practice auto-layout and matching code implementations. Teams can assemble production-ready journeys in minutes, confident that the behaviour and visual language will hold across every platform.
Given the history of over-promised systems in large organisations, we took measurement seriously. I built a valuation framework that combines Figma analytics, live time-trial benchmarks, sentiment scorecards and cost-centre data to quantify speed, quality and rework reduction. It’s how we can confidently say designers work up to 6× faster with the system, make dramatically fewer errors, and reclaim the equivalent of dozens of full-time roles in saved effort—without resorting to hand-wavy maths.
FY25 systems data / one of the supporting visuals I routinely produced for stakeholder packs
Contribution resources such as guidelines and interactive best practice checklists
Design & code always linked to a single source-of-truth
Under the hood, the system is built on a shared foundation layer that feeds our native libraries, which in turn flow into downstream products and marketing channels. Tokens, assets and guidelines are defined once, then expressed through iOS, Android and Web libraries before being consumed by apps, web banking, EDMs and campaign work. That architecture meant we could scale quickly without splinter systems or conflicting “sources of truth.”
Select clips from sizzle reel produced by our in-house creative studio
Other hats I wore on the job
Vendor Tooling Partner
Icon Creation & Publication
Production Resource Owner
Curated Marketing Artefacts
Head of Digital Brand
Technical / Dynamic Prototyping
Design system work rarely lives in a neat box. Owning adjacent areas like tooling partnerships, asset distribution, icon pipelines and marketing templates wasn’t a distraction—it was how we removed friction for teams and kept the experience coherent end-to-end. Taking on these responsibilities helped the system land as invisible infrastructure rather than “just a library,” and made it easier for teams to do the right thing by default.