Host Africa is a South African hosting and infrastructure company serving thousands of SMBs across the continent. By the time I joined, the product suite had scaled across web hosting, cloud, and domain management — but each product had its own visual and interaction language. My job was to make it feel like one company.
The problem
Every product team had shipped independently. Icons were inconsistent, spacing was arbitrary, and the same action looked different depending on which product you were in. Support tickets frequently referenced confusion about where to find things.
Beyond visual inconsistency, design-to-engineering handoff was slow. Specs were scattered across Notion docs, Slack threads, and email. Engineers were guessing, rebuilding, and asking the same questions twice.
01 / 03
Unified interaction language
I audited every product surface and catalogued 200+ component variants down to a single shared library. Buttons, inputs, modals, tables — each had one canonical version with documented states. The result was a product suite that finally felt like it belonged to the same company.
Shared component library across all Host Africa products
02 / 03
Structured handoff process
I introduced async Loom walkthroughs, redline specs, and component annotations as standard handoff artifacts. Engineers got everything they needed without a synchronous meeting. Handoff time dropped 30% and feature delivery accelerated by 20%.
Handoff spec template — component states, spacing, and interaction notes
03 / 03
Design metrics in OKRs
I ran quarterly stakeholder alignment workshops to embed design metrics — task completion rates, support ticket volume, design-to-dev cycle time — directly into OKR tracking. Design stopped being a service and started being a driver.
Design metrics dashboard presented in quarterly planning
Design decisions
Audit before you build
The temptation was to start designing a new system immediately. Instead I spent the first month cataloguing what existed. That inventory surfaced patterns I would have duplicated and helped me make the case to leadership for consolidation rather than reinvention.
One library, not three
Product teams each wanted their own component set. I pushed for a single shared library with contextual theming instead. It was harder to sell politically but the right technical call — teams that initially resisted it were the first to thank me six months later.
Make handoff a ritual, not a document
Written specs get ignored. I standardised async Loom walkthroughs as the primary handoff artifact — designers recording a 5-minute video of the spec. Engineers actually watched them. The ritual replaced three types of back-and-forth meetings.
Outcomes
Reflection
The biggest lesson from Host Africa was that design system work is 20% craft and 80% change management. The components were the easy part. Getting five product teams to adopt them, contribute to them, and trust them — that was the actual design problem. I'd do the stakeholder workshops earlier next time.