Royal Bank of Canada
Design Systems & Design Operations · 2017 – present
When I joined RBC in 2017, the digital design practice was largely contractor-driven, with no design system, no visual consistency, and no shared culture connecting designers across teams. Over 8.5 years I've helped build it from the ground up — first as a design operations leader building the team and practice, then as a Staff Designer evolving RIG (RBC Interface Guidelines), the design system that now powers 200+ designers and up to 1,000 developers across 25+ lines of business.
2017 - Senior Manager, Design Operations
2020 to Present - Staff Designer, Design Systems
Chapter 1 — Senior Manager, Design Operations
September 2017 – March 2020
I was brought in to professionalize a practice that had grown fast but without structure. My mandate was to build a real design team — with the right talent, the right culture, and the operational foundation to support it.
Directly managed 7 full-time designers and up to 10 contractors embedded across 20+ product teams, providing consistent leadership across a decentralized structure
Led all recruiting and hiring for the visual design discipline — building the processes, evaluation criteria, and onboarding programs that had not previously existed
Launched training and enablement initiatives to align visual design practice and raise the quality bar across the team
Contributed to broader design leadership work around career development, ways of working, and team structure as part of the design operations leadership group
Helped establish a culture of practice — creating visibility and connection between designers who had previously worked in isolation across separate product teams
Chapter 2 — Staff Designer, Design Systems
March 2020 – present
Following an organizational shift toward product-led design leadership, I transitioned into a Staff Designer role focused on RIG (RBC Interface Guidelines) — bringing my operational perspective to the craft and infrastructure work that underpins every digital experience at RBC.
Helped evolve RIG from standalone Sketch files into a robust, multi-platform system spanning Figma, React, Angular, SwiftUI, and Jetpack Compose — with a full design token architecture
Expanded RIG to support five distinct brand segments: Mass, Commercial, Enterprise, Wealth, and Avion — making it one of the most comprehensive multi-brand design systems in Canadian banking
Led the refinement and alignment of a new digital visual language within RIG — bringing cohesion to customer experiences across secure online banking, investing, and the flagship mobile app, with influence extending to the recently launched GoSmart investing app experience
Co-created and ran RIG Academy — an on-the-job training program covering Figma, RIG, component design, systems design, and visual design for designers across the organization
Created the RIG Ambassador role out of direct experience — two 6-month secondments with Direct Investing and Business Banking revealed a gap: spoke-level teams needed dedicated, sustained support to build and govern their own systems. That insight became the model for a program that gave product teams an embedded resource responsible for exactly that
Served as Visual Design Chapter Coordinator — building community, sharing knowledge, and driving design consistency across multiple visual design chapters spanning the full organization
25%
Average weekly time savings for designers and developers
1,000%+
Year-over-year RIG component usage growth across the org over 4 years
175+
Designers on the digital design team, up from 125
3.7 / 5
satisfaction rating — a system people actually enjoy using
Secondment spotlight
During two 6-month secondments with Direct Investing and Business Banking, I focused on driving real RIG adoption — not just awareness. I brought those teams from less than 5% RIG component usage to being responsible for over 30% of total RIG component usage and growth across the organization. That shift didn't happen by accident: it came from embedding with the teams, understanding their constraints, and building the case for RIG from the inside out. That experience directly informed the creation of the RIG Ambassador role.
Much of this work lives behind the firewall — and for good reason. But the thinking, the strategy, and the decisions that shaped it are very much mine to share.
If you'd like to go deeper on any part of this — RIG's architecture, the governance model, the team programs, or the journey from contractor crew to one of Canada's largest design practices — I'd love to talk.