Eightfold

The decision: making Octuple the source of truth

Octuple existed as a fledgling component library when I joined Eightfold. The decision I made — and pushed across product, engineering, and design leadership — was whether Octuple should become the canonical source of truth for the entire AI-powered talent intelligence platform, displacing the patchwork of local one-off components and third-party widgets teams had stacked up over time.

That wasn't the organizational default. Teams had their own preferences, their own deadlines, and real switching costs they didn't want to pay. I made the trade-off explicit, repeatedly, in working sessions, design crits, and roadmap reviews: short-term migration cost in exchange for long-term velocity, lower fragmentation, and a single accessibility baseline across the platform.

We took the trade. The 10,000+ touchpoint adoption in eight months that followed is the direct consequence of that decision — and it would not have happened without me pushing for it.

Octuple — from zero to 10,000+ touchpoints in eight months

Octuple (github.com/EightfoldAI/octuple, @eightfold.ai/octuple) is Eightfold's open-source design system. I founded it and led core development from inception. In under eight months it went from a fresh repository to more than 10,000 production implementation points across Eightfold's AI-powered talent intelligence platform.

• Founded the system — established the token architecture, primitive components, patterns, motion language, and accessibility baseline that everything downstream relied on.

• Drove adoption across Eightfold's full product surface — consolidating local one-off components and a graveyard of third-party widgets into a single coherent system.

• Authored the UX migration strategy that defined how teams moved off fragmented sources of truth onto Octuple — reducing duplication, improving velocity, and lowering the cost of design change.

• Established a holistic regression testing methodology — visual, behavioral, and accessibility — so design system releases didn't ship hidden risks into thousands of touchpoints.

• Storybook-first documentation — the public Storybook became both the contract and the discovery surface for downstream teams.

How I worked

• Managed a cross-functional v-team of engineers using agile/scrum, coordinating the parallel work of system development and platform adoption.

• Operated as a true UX engineer — owning design crits and code reviews on the same components, then shipping them.

• Winner, Eightfold Innovation Award 2022.

Continuity

The system is still active under Eightfold maintenance — 250+ releases, 1,100+ commits, MIT-licensed. The pattern I built it on — Storybook-first, accessibility-first, design-and-code in one head — is the same pattern I brought to Facet at Pulumi.