Led the development of Strava’s inaugural Design System, Spandex, through team collaboration bringing the design work, product needs and engineering requirements together to maximize value and impact to the org.
As of late 2022, Strava supported two native apps, a fully featured web app, numerous wearable apps and mobile web… without any design system to speak of. I came on board and built an end-to-end design and development process to support creation of design components, tokens and documentation for Strava’s native mobile and web applications. I also led the preliminary discovery work for the much user requested, and oft deprioritized Dark Mode theme.
Detailed Case Study
The following case study details the steps we took, the processes for design and engineering and cross-team collaboration, socialization and utilization of Spandex from the ground up.
Sample strategy and process screens:
Testimonial
“Jon is a rare design leader who has the ability to challenge designers and cross-functional peers of all levels. His honesty, candor, and curiosity have made an unforgettable impact on my time at Strava and my career at large. Jon joined our design team which had gone near-fully-remote after the pandemic. He quickly diagnosed silos and withdrawn behavior amongst the design team and championed a weekly product design crit. I have never worked with a design leader who encouraged and facilitated crit week after week with such commitment. It was through this commitment to talking about the work that I found myself bringing work to crit every week, he undid the pressure of a buttoned-up presentation in favor of collective design thinking and the ability to incrementally improve our design output as a whole. Through his guidance, we made critical design decisions, changed the course of our projects, and tried something new and wild. He made me feel safe, that I could speak to him about anything without punishment, and he helped me to turn concerns into action, confusion into questions, embarrassment into growth. To work with Jon is to make an investment in your people, to say that they are capable of great change and that through thoughtful effort, design can be a force within your organization. I hope I am lucky enough to work with him again someday.”
Gabriela Damazto
Senior Product Designer, Strava