SAP
SAP’s Fiori is one of the world’s largest enterprise design systems, used by hundreds of thousands of developers and designers across 180+ countries. Embedded as UX Writer on a team of 6 Figma designers — writing and maintaining the content layer of the system.
The work
Component guidelines, voice and tone standards, interaction copy, pattern documentation, content governance, accessibility writing, and Figma annotations — the full content layer of an enterprise design system used globally.
Writing the rules that 180+ countries of enterprise software must follow — clear enough that a designer in Tokyo and a developer in Berlin reach the same conclusion without a meeting. Each guideline had to be prescriptive without being restrictive, specific enough to be useful, and consistent with everything else in the system.
Why design system writing matters
Design system content governance is the difference between a system that gets adopted and one that gets ignored. Vague or inconsistent guidelines create the worst outcome — designers making independent copy decisions that contradict each other across products, and engineers building to the wrong spec.
At SAP’s scale, a single poorly written component guideline can propagate into hundreds of product interfaces across dozens of markets. Getting it right the first time isn’t perfectionism — it’s efficiency.
Impact
Consistent, clear component guidelines reduce the questions engineering teams bring back to designers — and reduce the inconsistencies that reach users. A well-governed design system content layer means less rework, fewer review cycles, and a product that sounds like it was built by one team, not fifty.