One Design System Across 40 Configurators and a Rigid Engine

When you're a solo designer delivering roughly 40 product configurators across ten categories, plus 25 e-commerce flows, a Design System stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the only way the work scales. At Zammit I built one inside the constraints of the DriveWorks configurator engine — which is the part that matters to an R&D team. The engine dictated how inputs rendered, how rules cascaded, how state was held. My system had to be expressive enough for spatial shelving configuration yet disciplined enough that a contractor flow and a retail flow felt like one product. I standardized input patterns, validation states, quote and checkout components, and the OTP and account surfaces so engineering wasn't re-deciding the same interaction forty times. The payoff for your team is predictability: fewer bespoke components to maintain, consistent behavior to test, and a shared vocabulary between design and the engine's rule layer. A Design System under an engine constraint isn't about visual polish — it's about reducing the surface area your developers have to reason about, so adding the next configurator is composition, not invention.