Scaling Omni at GSK

At GSK, the Commercial and Medical organisations had independently developed their own design systems. Each team had different naming conventions, component libraries, and token structures. As the organisation grew, this fragmentation created real problems: duplicated effort, inconsistent user experiences across products, and an inability to collaborate effectively across business units.

The existing systems — GSKpro Design System, Email Design System, Medical Design System, and Data Design System — each operated in isolation. When teams needed to share components or patterns, there was no common language or architecture to support it. The systems were at a critical inflection point: either unify or fragment further.

Rather than forcing one system onto all teams, I took a research-driven approach. I conducted competitive analysis across industry leaders — IBM Carbon, Microsoft Fluent, Shopify Polaris, Decathlon Vitamin, and Merck Liquid — to understand how large organisations scale design systems across diverse product portfolios.

Through interviews and surveys with stakeholders across both organisations, I mapped the existing landscape and identified where systems overlapped and where they genuinely needed to diverge. This research led to the creation of OmniOne — a unified naming and architecture framework that brought all sub-systems under the Omni umbrella while preserving domain-specific flexibility.

The architecture introduced clear tiers: OmniCore for shared primitives and foundations, with domain-specific extensions (OmniGSKpro, OmniEmail, OmniMedical, OmniData) that could evolve independently while inheriting from the core. I designed the governance model, contribution workflows, and documentation infrastructure to support this federated structure.

The unified Omni system established a common design framework across the organisation, transforming how 30+ product teams approach design and engineering. Teams that previously worked in isolation now share a common vocabulary, component library, and token architecture.

Efficiency improved significantly — redundant components were consolidated, and the shared naming framework streamlined collaboration between Commercial and Medical teams. The federated contribution model enabled teams to move quickly on domain-specific needs while maintaining consistency at the system level.

Communication across the organisation improved as stakeholders from design, engineering, product, and leadership could reference a single coherent system rather than navigating between fragmented tools and libraries.