Collapsing a 187-component design system down to 64 — and shipping twice as fast doing it.
Background
When I joined Finch, the system had been built by six different teams over four years. Each one had its own button. Each button had its own opinion.
The shape of the problem
Audit revealed 23 button variants, 11 input states, four parallel typography scales. Engineering complained loudest. Designers, surprisingly, did not.
A new ground floor
We rebuilt from primitives — color, type, space, motion — before re-deriving the component surface.
Constraint is a form of generosity. It tells the next designer what they don't have to decide.
Result
Twelve squads, one shared substrate. Time-to-prototype dropped from days to hours.