Philips Medical · Medical imaging, PACS and RIS · 2024–2025
A legacy design system, rebuilt in Figma the way the team actually works
Philips’ medical design team worked in Sketch on a complex, legacy design system. They owned two core products, PACS and RIS, plus smaller products and variants. I came in to move the team, the system and their daily practice to Figma.
Product strategy and DesignOps, contract. I owned the project from research and definition to shipping it to the designers and engineers. Once it was in their day-to-day work, I stayed on call for advice.
The design team and their engineering counterparts, from the first audit to the rollout.
Live
Where it started
A team shipping two core products from one Sketch library that had grown for years. Every variant lived somewhere else, and prototyping and user testing were slow, manual work.
What I did
01
Moved the team to Figma
Trained the designers and set up the file structure, libraries and workflow, so the move did not stall the products they were shipping.
02
Rebuilt the design system
Transitioned the entire system to Figma, component by component, and shaped it around how the team really builds: variants, states, light and dark, the density a radiologist needs.
03
Made it fit two products
PACS and RIS share one system, with the differences as variants rather than forks. Viewer toolbars, exam cards, patient history, all from the same parts.
04
AI workflows for prototyping and testing
Trained the team on AI workflows for prototyping and user testing. Starting a test on real users used to mean building a prototype by hand and waiting on engineering to wire it up. Now designers run the whole thing themselves.
Their daily infrastructure, today
The system, the tools and the basics they ship to production with.
The Figma system, the file structure and the AI workflows I set up are what the team designs in day to day. When I handed it over, it was already how they worked, not a migration they still had to finish.