Internal tools at Indeed are dense, data-heavy, and chronically under-resourced relative to consumer-facing products. As a designer working on internal platforms, I kept running into the same friction: components from the Indeed Design System needed constant adaptation to fit the real constraints of internal workflows; and I wasn't the only one doing it.

The workarounds were happening in isolation. Designers across teams were making the same adjustments, reaching out to each other in DMs to share rationale and patterns, and then going back to working alone. There was no shared library, no standards document, no place to put any of it.

That framing mattered. Internal tool designers contribute just as directly to Indeed's mission, they just do it from a less visible position. That invisibility was part of the problem I wanted to fix.