One system, so the product could keep changing.

Design Systems

When sessions started assembling themselves, screens stopped being fixed. The design system: tokens, blocks, and behaviour for a product whose content does not exist until a learner opens it.

Role
Head of Product Design
Context
AI Agent Era
Scope
Design System
Years
2025 — 2026

A system’s job is to accommodate the next iteration.

Most design systems are an agreement about appearance.

That is true until the product can think for itself and does something the system did not anticipate. Instead, we need to trust those who create and give them the context to deliver a superior experience without needing to correct every pixel.

The test is not whether the system covers today’s screens. It is whether Content Creators or AI Agents can output desirable interactions.

One token set — Colour, type, spacing and motion from one source of truth

Zero redesigns — New exercise types ship on blocks that already exist

Design System Refresh (2026)

Single Source of Truth.

The earlier system had grown by rapid acceleration through years of qualitative prototypes and growth hacking. With different interpretations of the same button. The refresh pulled colour, type, spacing and motion back to a set of tokens that are reusable, keeping only what more than one surface actually used.

Modular Exercise System (2025)

Learning types as blocks the teams and AI can order freely.

Every new exercise used to arrive as a new flow, which meant every new exercise added a layer of complexity. Making each learning type a self-contained block, with its own entry, practice, feedback and exit, meant the product could sequence them without asking anyone to redesign the session around them.

Actions (2025)

Sessions the product assembles, and a learner still recognises.

Actions are the agentic layer where the product decides what this learner should do now, from the blocks available. The design work was making an assembled session feel authored: consistent rhythm, predictable exits, and enough visible reasoning that adaptation reads as attention.

The system stopped being “make these screens match” and became “make anything we generate still feel like us”. — Design principle, 2025

Designing components for content that does not exist yet.

With generated content there is no real thing to preview, so every component had to answer four questions before it shipped:

A system that absorbs change instead of resisting it.

New exercise types ship without a redesign, and AI surfaces inherit the product’s voice by default rather than by review.

The practical measure: design review moved off pixels and onto behaviour and became discussions worth having.