Rewriting the Playbook: A Case Study on Redesigning the Design Process at eBay

When I joined eBay, the design org was full of talented, passionate people—but the way they worked was anything but unified. Each team operated in its own silo, with its own tools, rituals, and definitions of success. There was no shared blueprint for how design should happen, no consistent process guiding teams from insight to execution.

The result? Inconsistent quality, fragmented experiences, and an organization struggling to scale good design practices across products and platforms.

My charter was to change that: to create a unified, scalable design process that worked for everyone.

But I knew from experience—you can’t impose process from the top. It has to be built with the people who use it. This is the story of how we did that.

Step 01: Researching the Landscape

Before jumping into solutions, we committed to understanding the full picture.

We launched a deep discovery phase that included:

• Dozens of interviews with engineers, designers, and program managers

• Surveys across the global design organization

• Audits of design files, specs, documentation, and code repositories

We looked at everything. Our goal wasn’t just to identify broken processes—we wanted to understand the root causesand the unique needs of every team. What we uncovered was a complex ecosystem of overlapping tools, inconsistent rituals, and significant variation in design maturity from one team to the next.

We captured it all in a detailed Current State Report—a document that painted a clear picture of how design was actually happening across eBay, and where the most critical gaps were.

Step 02: Designing Together

Armed with a shared understanding of the problem, we moved into solution mode—but we didn’t do it alone.

We created a cross-functional Design Process Task Force, bringing together stakeholders from design, engineering, and product. The goal wasn’t just to define a process that could work in theory—it had to work in practice, for everyone.

This task force played two roles:

• First, as co-creators, helping us shape the design process based on real-world needs

• Then, as governors, maintaining and evolving the process after it was launched

The result was a sense of shared ownership. This wasn’t a top-down directive. It was a process the teams had built themselves.

In parallel, we also established a Design System Council—a governance body focused specifically on the design system component library and its evolution, ensuring quality and consistency across platforms.

Step 03: Creating the Playbook

A process isn’t truly usable unless it’s clearly documented and easy to follow. So we created the Design Best Practices Playbook—a comprehensive guide that outlined the new process, from kickoff to handoff.

The playbook included:

• Clear design stages and decision points

• Expectations for cross-functional collaboration

• Guidelines for documentation, specs, and handoff quality

• Links to supporting tools and resources

It didn’t just tell teams what to do—it showed them how, and why. Paired with the custom tools we built (detailed in a separate case study), the playbook helped ensure that the new process was practical, adoptable, and scalable.

Outcome: From Fragmentation to Flow

This wasn’t just a process redesign. It was an organizational shift—from isolated teams working in parallel to a collaborative network guided by shared principles.

We:

• United siloed teams under a common framework

• Brought designers, engineers, and PMs into the process design itself

• Created a playbook that made the process easy to adopt and scale

• Formed a Design Process Task Force to define and govern the new approach

• Established a Design System Council to guide design system evolution

• Laid the groundwork for automation and AI-powered workflows in the future

This work wasn’t about perfection—it was about progress, momentum, and building the kind of operational maturitythat design at scale requires.

And it worked—because we built it together.