A hard accessibility deadline landed on my Design Systems team in the middle of a company-wide AI push. We got the bug work done. Meanwhile, I pitched the org structure that meant we wouldn't need to do this again — expanding Design Systems into a UI Foundations org with two teams instead of one.
Sprout Social was pushing to integrate AI into every product area — a company-wide directive with real momentum behind it. At the same time, we had a hard external deadline for accessibility compliance across the whole product suite.
Both were real. Neither was going to move. And the Design Systems team — my team — was asked to close the accessibility gap. Feature by feature, product area by product area, bug by bug.
On paper it was an ask we couldn't refuse. No one else in the org had the accessibility expertise, and no other team had the bandwidth to hit the volume of bugs on the calendar. So we said yes.
But it was the wrong use of a horizontal team. Design Systems exists to scale — to make components, patterns, and guidance that a hundred product teams can use. Sending it into individual product areas to hunt individual bugs is the definition of unscaling.
We did the work anyway. The accessibility deadline was non-negotiable and the imperative was clear. But while we were fixing bugs, I was drafting a memo about why we shouldn't be.
I pitched expanding Design Systems into UI Foundations — an org that would hold the horizontal work under one roof, with two teams shaped for two different jobs.
Design Systems would keep working inside out: building the assets that scale, out to the whole product. Central ownership, shared language, the buffet the company self-serves from.
UI Integrity would work outside in: going into product areas to help teams migrate to newer components, giving accessibility guidance, spotting the shared experiences (nav, notifications, cross-product patterns) that should become system patterns, and closing the feedback loop back to Design Systems.
Neither team could exist alone. DS without Integrity means the system ships and nobody adopts it well. Integrity without DS means great advocacy for components that don't exist yet.
"Working inside out, and outside in."
— The strategy that let one org do two jobs without doing either badlyThe expansion got approval. UI Integrity spun up as a sibling team to Design Systems, both under UI Foundations. The accessibility deadline was met, and — critically — the next time a company-wide product initiative landed, Design Systems didn't get pulled off its scale work. UI Integrity was the right home for cross-product execution.
The feedback loop showed up in the data too: annual user survey engagement went up, and users reported clearer understanding of both how to use the system and how to get help.
Bigger picture, the two-team model gave Sprout a durable shape for horizontal UX work — one that could absorb the next unexpected ask without breaking the team that had to say yes to it.