When I embarked on the journey of creating Pegasus, McAfee's design system, I was a Senior Product Designer with a vision to unify and streamline the design process across multiple legacy platforms. The initiative evolved into a full-time leadership role, culminating in my transition to Product Design Manager, where I led a dedicated team in scaling Pegasus into a robust and widely adopted system.
McAfee's product ecosystem was fragmented, with inconsistent UI components, redundant design efforts, and platform inefficiencies, leading to higher costs and limited scalability.
Developed Pegasus, a scalable design system that unified UI components, improved workflow efficiency, and introduced governance to streamline cross-platform consistency.
Led the strategy, team building, execution, and advocacy for Pegasus, managing stakeholder alignment, design system governance, and engineering collaboration to drive adoption.
McAfee's product ecosystem was deeply fragmented — each platform had its own UI inconsistencies, redundant design efforts, and a lack of scalability. The absence of a unified design system created inefficiencies, increased development costs, and impacted the user experience.
Design systems were also emerging as a discipline, requiring us to define best practices while managing cultural change. To make Pegasus successful, I had to treat it like a product, complete with stakeholder alignment, team assembly, and agile development.
Pegasus began as a side project while I was a Lead Designer. Our VP of Design saw its potential and suggested that I transition into a managerial role to build and scale the initiative. I had to hire the right talent and establish the foundation for a scalable system.
With the right mix of skills, we moved from an ad-hoc approach to a structured, product-driven methodology.
Pegasus needed more than a library of components — it needed governance, scalability, and integration across McAfee's ecosystem. I structured the project into three phases.
Through Pegasus, I realized that design leadership extends beyond pixels and prototypes — it's about building teams, fostering collaboration, and driving organizational change. Transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager was a pivotal career moment.
After handing off Pegasus to another manager, I stepped into the Product Design Manager role, focusing on growing and mentoring product designers and ensuring their work was strategic and impactful.
Pegasus started as an idea and grew into McAfee's first scalable design system, impacting teams and products company-wide. It also shaped my career trajectory, helping me transition from designer to leader. The experience solidified my passion for people management, cross-functional collaboration, and design leadership — principles I continue to apply today.