Mobile Design System Technical Strategy

Company Background

You are joining OrchardPay, a fast-growing fintech that offers a consumer wallet, a small-business point-of-sale app, and a “pay-in-4” BNPL product. OrchardPay operates in the US, Canada, and the UK. The company has 38M registered users, 9.5M monthly active users (MAU), and processes $28B annualized total payment volume (TPV). Revenue is primarily interchange and merchant fees; FY2025 revenue is $1.15B with 22% YoY growth, but growth has slowed from 35% the year prior.

OrchardPay’s product suite has expanded through acquisitions: a UK wallet (native iOS), a POS app (Android-heavy), and a BNPL app (React Native). As a result, the mobile org is fragmented across 6 product tribes, each with its own UI patterns, component libraries, release cadence, and accessibility practices. The company’s brand team has also refreshed the visual identity (new typography, color palette, motion guidelines), and leadership wants a consistent experience across all mobile surfaces within 12–18 months.

Strategic Situation (Why Now)

Over the past two quarters, OrchardPay has seen a measurable increase in product and operational risk tied to inconsistent UI and duplicated engineering work:

• App Store rating drift: iOS rating fell from 4.8 → 4.5 after a redesign that introduced navigation inconsistencies and regressions.
• Support tickets: “Can’t find feature” and “confusing checkout” tickets increased 18% QoQ.
• Delivery speed: Median time from design approval to production release for a new feature is 10.5 weeks (target is 7 weeks). Post-launch bug fix cycles are frequent.

Competitively, two peers—BoltCash and Juniper Money—have been hiring aggressively for “Design Systems” and are shipping new mobile features faster. OrchardPay’s CEO has asked for a plan to improve execution speed without compromising compliance (PCI, SOC2 controls) or accessibility.

The CTO and CPO are debating whether to:

1. Build a single, unified mobile design system (components + tokens + tooling) that works across native iOS, native Android, and React Native, or
2. Allow platform-specific systems with shared brand tokens and guidelines, or
3. Buy/adopt a third-party system and standardize via governance and wrappers.

You are the Director of Mobile Platform Strategy. Your task is to define the technical vision and strategy for OrchardPay’s mobile design system, including the operating model and a pragmatic rollout plan.

Current State: Org, Tech Stack, and Pain Points

Mobile footprint

Engineering and design capacity

• Mobile engineers: 210 (iOS 70, Android 90, RN 50)
• Designers: 55 (product 45, brand 10)
• QA / Release: 30
• Current component libraries: 4 (two internal, one forked open-source, one vendor UI kit)

Baseline performance and cost signals

• Estimated duplicated UI work: ~18% of mobile engineering time (rebuilding similar components, re-implementing tokens, inconsistent QA)
• Accessibility compliance: only 62% of screens meet internal WCAG AA checks; audits are manual and late-stage
• Release incidents: 7 Sev-2 UI regressions/month on average (navigation, theming, text scaling)

Market and Competitive Context

OrchardPay’s leadership is considering whether a strong mobile design system could become a strategic advantage—internally (speed/quality) and potentially externally (developer platform credibility).

Competitor signals (public + recruiter intel):

Your Deliverables (What You Must Address)

Prepare a structured recommendation that covers:

1. Vision & principles: Define what “success” looks like for OrchardPay’s mobile design system in 18 months (technical and product outcomes).
2. Architecture choice: Recommend an approach (unified vs platform-specific vs hybrid) and justify it with trade-offs (performance, developer experience, governance, risk).
3. Market sizing / value sizing: Quantify the opportunity. Estimate the annual value from reduced duplicated work, faster delivery, fewer incidents, and improved conversion/retention (use reasonable assumptions).
4. Competitive analysis: Use a structured lens (e.g., Porter's Five Forces / SWOT) to explain why this matters competitively and what moats it could create.
5. Go-to-market and adoption plan: Propose how you would roll it out across tribes (sequencing, incentives, migration strategy), including how you’ll measure adoption.

Constraints

• Timeline: 12 weeks to present a board-ready strategy; 18 months to realize meaningful impact.
• Budget: incremental $6M/year max (headcount + tooling). You can reallocate existing headcount but cannot exceed the cap.
• Regulatory: Must not introduce changes that risk PCI compliance or break audit logging in checkout flows.
• Platform constraints: BNPL checkout SDK must keep p95 render time under 16ms for critical screens; POS app must support older Android devices.
• Organizational reality: Product tribes have autonomy; you cannot mandate adoption without a compelling value proposition and governance model.

Notes

You may ask clarifying questions in a real interview. For this prompt, make and state assumptions explicitly and keep the math simple but defensible.