## What was the business problem to solve?

Enterprise Sketch customers were missing an easy way to work with Branded Design Systems. Imagine a design team working for a telecom company that has 10 sub-brands. They share the same basic components structure, but have minor visual variations between them. In Sketch, you would need to maintain 10 completely independent libraries (one per design system). This made maintenance a nightmare, was very error prone, and slowed down the app. Also, our main competitor had better tools to deal with this scenario.

We had something to try to solve this problem somewhere in the roadmap, but our customers needed help immediately (some of them were threatening to cancel their subscriptions if we did not address this problem soon). 

So we decided to build an MVP of a tool that would solve their main pain points.

## How did you measure success?

This was easy: if we could reduce the amount of lost work hours per customer, the project would be a success.

In the most extreme case, we had a customer whose entire design team would spend **one week** merging changes from the main design system library to the rest of their branded libraries (they had 15 in total, with thousands of components).

We reduced that to a *3 minutes operation* that required one click, executed by one person.

## What challenges did you face along the way, and how did you address them?

There were 3 main challenges:

1. The problem we were solving was very broadly scoped. There are literally hundreds of ways in which you can structure a design system library, and it’s impossible to build a tool that covers all scenarios and edge cases. We decided to be very opinionated about what the tool would handle, and how it would work. Initially we considered the possibility of offering many options to customize the behaviour, but that made the code unmaintainable. Instead, we released the code for the tool as an open source project, so that customers with very specific needs could adapt the tool to their workflows.

2. Our users may not always have a development team. The initial idea was to make Sketch Fusion a command line only tool. But many of our end users were not comfortable with the idea of installing the required dependencies and using the Terminal. We addressed the problem by implementing the tool as a dual command line / web app solution, and hosting it ourselves for “demo purposes”.

3. We were not intimately familiar with the problem we were solving. Sketch’s design team was/is small, and had never faced the same challenges our large customers encountered every day. So we had to familiarise ourselves with this scenario. To do that, we had multiple work sessions with customers, to understand how they worked and the kind of documents they were managing. NDAs were signed, and we got access to actual production documents we could use to understand the nuances of the problem space, and use as sample documents to test the tool.

## What stakeholders did you work with on this project?

I worked both with internal and external stakeholders:

Internally:

* Customer Success Managers: they identified the accounts that had the problem we were trying to solve, got us in touch with their design teams, and kept the customers updated on the progress of the tool. They needed good news for customers as soon as possible.

* Design Advocates: worked with customers to understand the problem space, working with their files. They provided great insights to scope the tool, and were of great help when testing the tool (both the features and the usage).

Externally:

* Design Leads at multiple companies: they were our connection with the real world, and the ultimate responsibles of validating that our approach was good. They wanted to see we really understood their struggle, and that we offered them a real solution they could use.

Sketch Fusion: a tool to merge design documents

Designer

A series of five blog posts describing the possibilities of working with Sketch’s Open File Format.

File Format Series

Sketch Fusion is a tool to merge Design System documents.

Sketch Fusion

A Sketch Plugin to migrate Layers and Styles to use the new Color Variables feature in Sketch 69.

Color Variables Migrator

A Sketch Plugin to easily grab images from Unsplash. Developed in collaboration with Unsplash as their official integration with Sketch.

Unsplash Sketch Plugin

A Sketch Plugin that automatically compresses SVG assets using SVGO at export time.

SVGO Compressor

A community for Sketch Plugin developers. I was responsible for installation, hosting, maintenance, administration and moderation of the forum.

Sketch Plugins Forum

Sketch Commands is a port of Orange Commands to Sketch.

It served as a learning exercise and a testing ground for the Sketch Plugin API (which Sketch developers documented on-demand as I asked for things I needed).

Sketch Commands

Created and maintained the ActionScript Bundle for TextMate.

TextMate ActionScript Bundle

Created and maintained an open source code editor for ActionScript. It brought me lots of joy (and recognition in the ActionScript community) and it was featured in multiple Flash books and online articles.

SciTE|Flash

Orange Commands was a collection of scripts for Adobe Fireworks, designed to ease the work of digital designers.

I learn a great deal about product management and customer feedback with this project. In particular, one of my favourite lessons about how dogfooding is not the panacea we think it is: https://twitter.com/bomberstudios/status/1487038014916337665

Orange Commands

Created and managed the TextMate Spanish mailing list

TextMate Spanish Mailing List

Design Hacking, using technology to practice the noble art of working less

Introduction to DesignOps

The hammer factory

101 Things I did not learn at Design School

Supercharging Sketch

Hacking Sketch for fun & profit

ADPList Mentor

I wanted to keep this short, but I’m more than happy to share stories about my time leading a design team during the Dotcom crash in 2001, building an online game for children at my own startup, or working for the adult entertainment industry. Just ask!

Designer and Design Manager

The Cocktail is one of Spain's most prominent and influential digital agencies. I worked as a digital designer in a hybrid visual / UX / coding role. I became a reference for other designers inside and outside the company and learned to work alongside a talented development team.

I participated in design projects for enterprise customers (banks, telcos, media), some of which won design industry awards in Spain.

Art Director

I joined Designit Madrid to elevate the Design practice at the company and lay the foundations for sustainable growth, both in headcount and work quality.

During my time there, I launched many practices still in operation now, like regular design critiques or pair design sessions. I mentored designers to develop their skills and careers both inside the organization and outside of it (I like to play a very long game when it comes to career development).

I used my previous experience as a product designer to incorporate agile techniques and work processes into our design offering, in some cases radically improving our ROI and time to market.

Design Director

I joined Sketch as its seventh employee.

From day one, I helped the company scale, finding opportunities in our organization and turning them into company functions. I jumpstarted disciplines inside the company, like QA, Research, and Customer Advocacy.

I also actively contributed to defining and spreading the company culture long before we had a People team.

Being part of a mostly flat hierarchy, I was able to flex my lateral leadership muscles, helping team members solve internal challenges and conflicts.

My public-facing achievements include:

- helping set the product direction in its early stages, using my experience working with large design teams to find ways to make the tool fit existing workflows.
- creating and growing the plugin developer community and scaling it into a vibrant and thriving ecosystem.

More recently, I became the Product Manager for a future new Plugins system (which, sadly, has been discontinued).

Various Roles

Water is one of the most valuable resources on Earth. Yet up to 50% of drinking water is *lost* on its way from treatment plants to customers’ homes.

Qatium is a digital water management solution that helps small and medium-sized utilities and water professionals manage their networks, using state-of-the-art simulation models.

I lead the Collaboration initiative at Qatium, as a hybrid product management / product design role. I also use my design experience to improve the design practice at a developer-centric organisation, trying to unite both disciplines.

Product Maker

Bebanjo’s mission is transforming the international Video On Demand industry from the inside, creating tools that improve content management and distribution.

I joined as their first product designer and took that as an opportunity to get familiar with agile workflows and techniques (in particular, pair programming was a revelation for me).

I also sharpened my “design with code” skills and learned how it feels to work in a small high-performance team.

Ale Muñoz

2022