Unifying SEI's fragmented application suite

SEI had accumulated applications the way large financial firms usually do: one product at a time, each with its own team, its own patterns, and its own idea of what a button should look like. The result was expensive to maintain and confusing to use.

The problem

The failure point wasn't any single interface. It was the absence of a shared foundation. Every team was re-solving the same problems, and inconsistency was being created faster than screen-by-screen fixes could ever resolve it. A Figma library wouldn't fix this either — front-end developers far outnumbered designers, and design review could never be the bottleneck through which every screen passed.

The bet

Put the guardrails in the code, not the documentation. I architected and delivered a coded Angular component library where the design decisions were encoded as constraints — accessible focus, contrast, and state behavior shipped inside the components themselves, so nobody had to remember it screen by screen.

The test for every component was the same: can a developer who has never talked to a designer ship a screen that looks like it belongs? If the answer required a style guide open in another tab, the component wasn't done.

Outcome

First users onboarded to the live, unified platform. More durably, the org now builds on a single foundation: new screens come out consistent by default, and design review shifted from policing pixels to shaping product.