UNOWHY operated five distinct product brands from a single engineering organization: SQOOL (the main educational tablet suite), SQOOL Extend (virtual machines), SQOOL Protect (content filtering and parental controls), Hi SQOOL (the student communication platform), and the corporate brand used across institutional communication. Eight or more applications, spanning Android, Windows, and web. Each brand had its own product manager and its own visual identity. None of them shared components.
The case for a unified design system was obvious from an efficiency standpoint. The case against it, from a product manager's perspective, was also obvious: a shared component means your product looks like the others, moves at the speed of others, and has its roadmap constrained by others. Getting five PMs to surrender that autonomy required a different conversation than the one designers usually have.
