When Kroger committed to an enterprise-wide design-system modernization, tokens became the connective tissue. Not because they were fashionable, but because they were the only artifact that designers, engineers, accessibility specialists, and product owners could co-own.
Our team treated the token pipeline like product infrastructure. The system ingested updates from Figma libraries, validated them against WCAG, generated multi-platform outputs, and triggered documentation changes in one pass.
Map atomic semantics first
We started by cataloging every semantic need across web, native, and kiosk experiences. Naming wasn’t relegated to late-stage bikeshedding—it was rolled into discovery with designers and content strategists.
This groundwork prevented brittle overrides later. When design introduced new motion primitives, the schema absorbed them without breaking parity across SDKs.
- Align tokens to intent (e.g., `action/primary/background`) instead of hexadecimal values
- Codify guardrails for contrast, spacing ratios, and typography scales at the token level
- Model fallbacks up front so cross-platform packages ship from one source
Automate the governance feedback loop
Every token PR triggered automated docs updates, changelog generation, and Slack notifications to consuming teams. Combined with adoption dashboards, this made design ops transparent and measurable.
Release trains shrank from weeks to days because product teams trusted the signal—and the automation gave us confidence to iterate quickly.