The brief

Acacia began as six divergent component libraries — one per product team — with no shared tokens, no shared language, and a steady drift in look and feel. The mandate was to unify them into a single, themeable system without freezing product teams mid-flight.

Approach

We started from tokens, not components: a small, audited set of colour, type, spacing, and radius primitives that every surface could adopt incrementally. Components were rebuilt on top, shipped behind a migration codemod so teams could move at their own pace.

Outcome

Within a year Acacia underpinned every shipping surface, cut UI bug reports by a third, and turned "which button do I use?" into a non-question.