During the first couple of years, several applications have been built under the Cymonz platform and each of them was designed by a different designer which led to a massive technical and design debt. Building products fast was an understandable strategy for a startup but, a few years later, when I joined the team, current products were very slow, inconsistent and, to be honest, not really eye-candy. That was the time when the term "design system" was barely mentioned in the community so, naturally, we started to redesign app-by-app over the course of two years.
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A lot of things were improved during the redesign phase and most of the old debt was "paid off" but in the long run, I created my own here and there. I just couldn't remember the exact shade of grey I used 8 months ago on a similar page... those kinds of things. It was very easy to get lost while multi-tasking between several applications or projects at once.
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The other problem was scalability, every now and then when a new feature was about to be introduced it would require creating a slightly different element or page which lead to inconsistent design, again. When that happens a few issues occur, such as slow prototyping, increased feedback time, repetitive design elements, bloated code, difficult usability, etc.
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That wasn't all. In the middle of the redesign phase we finally decided to move to Sketch so all Photoshop files were migrated, which messed up some things, too.
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On top of all that, the team members worked on three, sometimes, even four continents, so the communication was very difficult. Nobody took seriously the request to update the border thickness on some "not so important" component. The phrase "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" had a lot of sense in those situations.

After the research, I found some early publications explaining the Atomic Design approach by Brad Frost. In short, by using the Atomic Design approach the design system and its components are built with a hierarchy in mind just like in the natural world. Atomic elements combine together to form molecules, these molecules can combine to form relatively complex organisms, etc.

Design system helps to remove the clutter of all unnecessary things, establish the guidelines and, determine the visual language in order to save time and focus on things that matter, such as user experience, problem-solving, iteration, etc.

Sketch App was the main tool to handle the design part and, later on, when Sketch Libraries rolled out the process was even more streamlined. At first, I tried Google Docs in combination with inVision DSM but these tools weren't able to provide all the things required. Luckily, I stumbled upon a very good article by Andrew Couldwell explaining the essentials and how he managed the documentation for his project which was the primary task for me at the time. I reached him on Twitter and he shared some additional insights and recommended the GitBook as a documentation tool which was exactly what I needed. Thanks, Andrew. :)

Building consistent data-heavy products at scale is not an easy task. Beside time and resources, it also requires a focused and concentrated state of mind. Planning and discipline are very important. Plus, when your team members work from other continents, detailed and neat documentation is vital because organized .psd/.sketch files, styleguides, and interactive prototypes are just not enough.

The number of pages was really, really big. To have them all in "RAM" was impossible so I had to screenshot and print each one of them and then group similar ones into piles. Once the audit was conducted, I could focus on a smaller number of pages and start to look for similar patterns, elements and components that could be merged. The plan was to design responsive and flexible elements so they can be reused again and again across the whole platform.

Later on, these elements, called organisms, were used to create templates that helped for pages to appear much simpler and cleaner. Most importantly, all these components were designed with real content and problems in mind, solely for the Cymonz platform.