Vanguard Design System Internship Proposal
Project Type: Program Design
Role: UX Design System Intern
Date: Quarter 1, 2025
Adapting my experience as Vanguard’s first Design System intern into the groundwork for an official position.
Starting from Scratch
Starting in February 2025, I was given the opportunity to join Vanguard’s Design System team as their first intern. This meant that I was coming into a position that had a completely blank slate. Who would I contact? What would I do on a daily basis? What would I need to know? What tasks would I need to take on? Over the next three months, it would be my responsibility to answer these questions, and leave the team with the groundwork for launching a future, official program.
The Design System Difference
Working on a design system was a very different beast to the product team focus of a bootcamp curriculum. This meant that, while I was able to use my Figma knowledge fairly frequently, the actual design thinking and, much more importantly, documentation skillsets were completely new to me.
VET, short for Vanguard Experience Team, made use of a few core systems: a Documentation site that contained every UI element and pattern, as well as their proper use; a collection of Figma files containing active versions of these elements, enhanced designs of each for a 2.0 build, and files for generating specs to update said elements; a Github repository containing the code for each element; and a Storybook that combined the elements usages with plug and play code examples. To begin making myself useful, I had to learn the ins and outs of each.
Access Issues
Fortunately, I had plenty of time to upskill during the first couple weeks at Vanguard. As a financial institution handling mass quantities of sensitive information, their security is exceptional. This meant that, upon being issued my equipment, it would still take several weeks to gain usage rights for all of the software I would be using (this will be an important note in my final proposal).
During the waiting period, I read everything that existed about the Constellation design system. Beyond that, I scheduled meetings with all the members of the design team, learning their roles and responsibilities. This would become vital for sculpting my little niche in a productive way. I also attended every meeting I possibly could, so as to gain a wider perspective of how VET engaged with Vanguard product teams.
Defining a Design Team Intern
After resolving my access issues, it was time to earn my keep. How could I contribute to this team?
My sprint work came in three increasingly complex forms:
-Backlogged support tasks: I would primarily handle the completion of various data gathering spreadsheets.
-Component library audits: Checking every component in the Constellation library for inconsistencies and patterns guided by specific themes.
-Component spec generation: Building updated versions of components in our Figma library and creating detailed documentation for developer handoff.
The sprint work, especially speccing, didn’t start smoothly, but that in itself contributed to my growth. For each issue I faced, I built connections with the team, and developed an understanding of who to reach out to for different areas of expertise.
Crafting the Handbook
In the last month of my time at Vanguard, I shifted my focus from sprint work back to my original goal: Creating a structure for future internships aimed at the VET team. Throughout the internship, I had kept a journal of my daily activities, which, paired with my experience in sprints and meetings, would prove vital for compressing my experience into something communicable and instructive.
I wanted to leave behind a product that was not only useful for VET when it came to hiring future interns, but helped to thoroughly guide future interns. What I decided to create was a comprehensive internship handbook, one that would tell those who come after who to talk to for what, what exactly they would be doing in a given time span, what to expect in their work, what meetings to attend. I aimed to prevent the confusion and aimlessness I sometimes felt from occurring down the line through this combination of onboarding document and recommendation pamphlet.
The core elements of my handbook were:
-A brief introduction on the goals of a VET internship
-Hierarchy of mentorship roles
-Detailed assignment descriptions, including their complexities and growth opportunities
-The phases of the program, with information on what would be focused on when
-All meetings, sorted by priority.
The Proposal
Now that I had crafted the internship, the final goal of my internship journey was to sell it. I consolidated my entire handbook into a 10 slide deck.
I had two presentations to do, with rapidly different time constraints.
The first was slotted for an hour: a detailed but casual conversation with the UX leaders of the division that oversaw VET. These were people I knew, including the person that had hired me for the task of building the internship itself. I was given the chance to show most of my handbook and expand upon theoretical circumstances that could occur in the future of the team, allowing me to demonstrate the depth of thought I had put into the handbook.
The second presentation was slotted for fifteen minutes: Pitch your program to the stakeholders of the VET team. This was conducted during the biweekly leadership meeting, and allowed me to demonstrate how I had broken down such a lengthy process into concise benefits and phases.
While both presentations asked for very different styles, they left me with confidence that the program I had laid out was both an effective synthesis of my internship experience as well as a powerful tool for both Vanguard’s design system team and the new UXers they decide to recruit.