The situation
CDK Global’s dealership software had grown through acquisition. By 2017, a dealership running CDK’s full suite was working across multiple applications, each with its own navigation patterns, visual language, and interaction model. The same user, in the same day, would switch between products that felt like they came from different companies.
This wasn’t just a design problem. It was causing real business harm: onboarding new employees took weeks instead of days, support call volume was high, and customers were churning to competitors with more coherent products.
The brief
Converge the suite. Create a shared design language, unified navigation, and a component system that could be adopted by teams building across the full product portfolio.
In practice, this meant: talk twelve separate product teams into agreeing on standards they didn’t set, couldn’t fully control, and would have to live with.
What the work actually was
The design system was the artifact. The real work was organizational.
Each product team had its own design and engineering staff, its own roadmap, and its own opinion about the right way to do almost everything. Getting adoption required understanding what each team actually needed, and designing a system flexible enough to serve their legitimate differences, while firm enough to create coherence at the suite level.
What worked:
- Starting with research, not opinions, we ran usability studies across all products simultaneously, documenting the specific friction points users experienced when switching contexts. This gave us shared evidence instead of competing intuitions.
- Building in the open, the design system was developed collaboratively, with representatives from each product team. Teams that shaped the system felt ownership over it.
- Shipping fast, rather than designing the complete system before building anything, we shipped incremental components to production quickly. Adoption follows proof.
- Naming things carefully, a shared vocabulary across teams turned out to matter as much as shared components. When everyone calls the same element the same thing, coordination overhead drops.
The outcome
96% adoption across the suite within 18 months. Onboarding time for new dealership employees dropped by 50%. Support call volume related to navigation confusion decreased significantly.
More durably: CDK had a design system capability it hadn’t had before, the organizational muscle to make coherent product decisions at scale. That infrastructure shaped every major product initiative that followed, including Fortellis.