Allianz Commercial Cook Book
Services
Design Leadership · Design Systems · Project Management
Employer
Allianz
Twelve product teams were making the same UX decisions separately and getting different answers. As UX Lead, I owned the Cook Book: a pattern library that turned repeated debates into decisions made once and used everywhere. It also became the front door for every new design system request.
Allianz Commercial had 12 product teams across 3 geographies, all building from one design system. The system gave them components. It did not tell them how to use those components together.
Where does the save button go on a full screen modal? How wide should a field be? When does a table need a toolbar?
The answers were reasonable, but different. Designers lost sprint time re-debating settled questions, developers built similar patterns in several ways, and new component requests arrived with no context.
As UX Lead for mid corp and large corp, I could see the pattern across every team. The job was to build something that made a decision stay made.
I treated the Cook Book as a product. It had users, designers and developers, a clear job, ending the repeated debates, and an owner, me.
I organised it around the questions teams actually asked, in five groups: content and accessibility, layout and structure, UX patterns, data display, and feedback and messaging. It covers navigation, spacing, button placement, tables, forms, filters, modals and notifications.
Because I worked inside the scrum teams, I pulled decisions into the library as they came up. Each pattern was documented once with its reasoning.
The Cook Book also became the front door to the design system. Teams raised new component requests through it, with context attached. I sat on the board that reviewed those requests against sprint priorities and business strategy, so the system grew with purpose.
Decisions stopped being re-argued. A question settled for one team was settled for all twelve, and the saved time went back into designing journeys.
Design system requests arrived with context, so they were quicker to review and easier to prioritise.
12 teams across 3 geographies aligned on one library
40% faster design decisions inside sprint cycles
30+ patterns documented across 5 categories
The library is still live and maintained. It also gave us the foundation for the responsive form template that followed.