Design Systems · Standards · Team Leadership · The Home Depot
When I joined the ECC team, design was a constant negotiation—three designers, no shared standards, nonstop review meetings. I built the principles, the system, and the culture shift that turned an order-taking group into a team with a clear, defensible point of view.
I joined the Enterprise Customer Communications (ECC) team in February 2025. The team's job was designing customer communications across email, SMS, RCS, and iOS Live Activity—a high-volume, high-stakes surface touching millions of customers at critical moments in their journey.
Three designers. A principal. A manager. And no shared framework for deciding what "good" looked like. Every project became a negotiation. Every review became a debate. The people most equipped to run those debates were spending all their time in them.
"We were all confused all the time. The goal wasn't better design—it was a shared understanding of what better design meant."
A typical design request moved through four or five stakeholders before reaching approval. Feedback ranged from copy tone to whether a request was worth designing at all. Designs weren't necessarily wrong—they just weren't grounded in anything everyone agreed on.
I started by running a survey with the team to surface what we each believed about communications design. I workshopped the results with leadership so they could shape and sanction the output. The goal: principles that weren't mine—principles the whole team owned.
The process mattered as much as the result. Principles that come from one designer get questioned. Principles that come from the team get used.
The principles cover two core commitments: creating communications that are timely and impactful, and supporting customers in navigating their Home Depot experience. Under each, specific tenets govern execution—from content hierarchy and copy tone to channel selection and brand standards.
We socialize them at the point of intake. When a team brings a new request, we reference them. When someone asks for a channel we shouldn't support, we reference them. They're not a document—they're a decision-making tool.
Alongside the principles, I built out our design standards—a living document covering the specifics of how we design communications across every channel we support. They emerged from an audit of what we already do, paired with a competitive analysis of how others handle the same problems.
I own and maintain the component library the team designs from. The standards aren't separate from the system—they're embedded in it. When you open the Figma file, the right decision is the obvious one.
The same principles and standards that guide human designers are now baked into a production AI agent I built on Gemini Enterprise. The agent reads our communications guidelines, project context from Confluence and Slack, and drafts a first-pass communications design—giving the team a grounded starting point instead of a blank canvas.
This matters because the standards aren't just policy documentation. They're now machine-readable logic. When the agent recommends where a badge should go, it's applying the same rules the team agreed on. The guidelines created alignment among people—and now they create consistency in tooling too.
The most significant outcome wasn't a metric. It was a change in how the team sees itself—and how the rest of the organization sees us.
Before standards, any stakeholder could arrive with any request and we'd figure out the "right way" in a room together. Now we have an answer before they arrive. We know what we support, why we support it, and what we won't do—and we can show our work.
"The goal of this team changed from 'creating emails' to 'creating a way of working.' The designing is the easy part. We made it rigorous."
The principal's time is no longer consumed by routine approvals. Junior designers can move independently because the framework tells them what "good" looks like. And when requests come in that don't fit, we can push back with confidence—not opinion.