Hawkins Design System

While at Netflix, I mostly worked on creating, extending, and maintaining components for Hawkins Professional, the Design System used to develop internal tools at Netflix.

What is Hawkins?

Hawkins, named after the fictional town where Stranger Things events occur is Netflix’s Design System. Hawkins comes in two flavors: Hawkins Consumer tailored for any member-facing experiences including streaming and Hawkins Professional tailored for enterprise-level workflow built by Netflix Studio and also internal tools.

The Process

I would like to show you the process how we operated from the request of a feature to the publishing of it.

1. Backlog
Most of the requests came through Slack channels. Sometimes the request would be to create a new unexisting component, sometimes to extend a component and other times simply a bug report. Everything was logged into our backlog in Trello.

2. Voting
Each quarter we would pack all our requests and over 50 Product Designers would vote on tasks they would like us to work at. Designers were excited in participating in shaping our Roadmap.

3. Roadmap
After the voting period ended we would prioritize the tasks based in the number of votes. We would then estimate each task and build the quarterly roadmap.

4. Design Progress
After the roadmap was announced I would start working on each task and move the task from the “Backlog” to “In Progress”. Most of the time I would create a branch in our Figma Library and work directly there.
After the task was done I would request for feedback, either internally of to the designer or team that requested the feature originally.

5. Working with engineers
Once the request was done, I would move the task to “Ready for Engineering” and engineers would take over. Depending on the component I would create specs, but most of the time it was not needed thanks to the usage of foundational tokens re-utilizing components while creating bigger patterns. Once engineer work was done they would send me a link where I could check the work done and sign off. We would then agree on a release day so the feature was published in synch with eng.

6. Merging, publishing, and announcing
The last part of the process was merging the branch, publishing the library, and announcing the changes over Slack and through our changelog page. This was my favorite part of the process, I really loved shipping new stuff and seeing the reaction of the designers and engineers that would use those new features.

7. Support
I regularly helped with support over Slack, Office Hours, and ad-hoc 1:1

Wrapping up

I really enjoyed helping improve and extend Hawkins Professional adoption through the company to over 400 projects! If you would like to learn more about Hawkins you should watch this video.

 me at wikichaves@gmail.com, LinkedIn, Dribbble or Instagram.