Wow: Building a Design System Across a Multi-Product Platform

The cost was felt everywhere: designers duplicated work across products, engineers implemented inconsistent UI, and new features took longer because there was no shared starting point.

Wow started as a system for Prezi Video. New platform gave us the opportunity to rewrite the components using new codebase and scale it to the entire product range. What began as a Video-specific foundation was eventually expanded into a shared backbone for Present, Video, and Design, covering the full end-to-end platform experience.

My contribution spanned two layers of the system simultaneously.

On the token side, I worked with the design team on the foundational decisions - colour, typography, spacing, and elevation - that needed to hold up across three products with different visual contexts.

The old codebase had deeply nested, product-specific code with no token layer - values were baked directly into components. Swapping in new tokens wasn't a find-and-replace operation. Adoption was slower than the system's quality warranted - not because teams didn't want to use it, but because the technical migration cost was real and had to be sequenced carefully alongside live product work.

I was tasked with making the new components precise enough that engineers could trust them without negotiation. The goal was to make adopting Wow easier than continuing to maintain the legacy system.