#345 - Would you rather waste 2500 design hours on 250 screens or create a design system?

Erin O'Donnell Howard, Executive Director of Product and Design at Charles River Labs joins us to share her unique journey of leading this research & life sciences org through a huge design transformation where she not only built a new design function but also built a design system ground up with this new team.    Erin unpacks how she springboarded a design system keeping the need for consistent design for the various products at CRL at the center, adding the fundamental componentization and tokenization to a living and breathing process with user stories that translate from the design boards to the engineers code base much quickly. Driving excitement among the teams to achieving operational efficiencies so designers can focus on the actual solution and the experience they are after, away from the noise of wasting time redesigning small reusable components.   If you are wondering if your org is ripe to execute a Design System or how to measure the performance of your current design system, this episode is for you.