What does it take to transform 121 years of automotive legacy into a modern digital ecosystem? Catherine Dubut, Director of Global UX Strategy at Ford Pro shares how her team is reengineering the organization’s fragmented product landscape into a scalable, unified digital assembly line.
With over 80 legacy sites, 20+ global markets, and deeply siloed teams, the scale and complexity of Ford Pro’s challenge was immense. Catherine explains how her team brought structure to chaos—combining elements from outdated systems, building new foundations where needed, and stitching them together into a single, coherent design system. From establishing governance and cross-functional collaboration to introducing micro frontends and scaling adoption, this episode offers a playbook for modernizing UX at enterprise scale.
Key themes:
- Designing for fleets, not just drivers—multiple users, journeys, and roles per customer
- Replatforming 80+ tools across legacy systems and international business units
- Building a design system through consolidation, extension, and future-proofing
- Using micro frontends to bridge disparate tech stacks across Ford Pro
- Measuring success through design efficiency, team adoption, and developer alignment
Guest
Catherine Dubut is Director of Global UX Strategy at Ford Pro, the commercial business of Ford Motor Company. She oversees a global team of individual contributors and managers across design, user research, information architecture, and content strategy. Catherine is a seasoned UX leader with a track record of designing impactful experiences, driving UX practice maturity, and digital transformation at dynamic brands at places like Samsung Electronics, REI, and Intuit. Based in Seattle, Catherine’s been involved in design community activities including organizing local events, mentoring underrepresented UX professionals, public speaking, and writing. She enjoys exploring cities, outdoors, architecture, and other adventures with her husband, daughter, and terrier mix rescue.
Transcript
Chris Strahl [00:00:00]:
Hi, welcome to the Design Systems Podcast. This is the place where we explore where design, development and product overlap. Hear from experts about their experiences and the lessons they've learned along the way, and get insights into the latest trends impacting digital product development and design systems from the people who pioneered the industry. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Knapsack. Check us out at Knapsack.cloud. If you want to get in touch with the show, ask some questions, or tell us what you think, send us a message over on LinkedIn. You can find a direct link to our page in the show Notes. We'd love to hear from you.
Chris Strahl [00:00:26]:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Design Systems Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Today I'm here with Catherine Debou from Ford Pro. Catherine, want to say hi.
Catherine Dubut [00:00:34]:
Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me on, Chris.
Chris Strahl [00:00:36]:
Yeah, really excited to have you. So Catherine comes from a part of Ford that is a little different than when you think about Ford normally. Right. My dad has been an owner of Ford pickups since I think the day I was born. My first car was a Ford Bronco. And so I tend to think about Ford in that context of like going to a dealership, driving a car a lot. But Catherine's world's a little bit different, so why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do?
Catherine Dubut [00:01:01]:
Yeah. So I'm the director of Global UX strategy at Ford Pro, which is the commercial fleet business within Ford Motor Company, and it's a huge business and has been around for decades. And it's a really exciting time now because given Ford's history and it being 121-year-old company, there is a lot going on with the commercial fleet business and how we're trying to move through a digital transformation.
Chris Strahl [00:01:30]:
When you think about fleet business, what are you really talking about?
Catherine Dubut [00:01:34]:
Yeah, so a fleet can be defined as little as one to five vehicles for a very small business. And it can also be as large as thousands of vehicles. So we have companies who have been with us for years, and they know exactly what they want to order every year, and it's a huge volume. And we also have customer companies that have mixed fleets. So they don't always have all Ford. They have other OEMs as well for various different needs. When we talk about fleet vehicles, those are primarily trucks and vans. So when we think about trucks, what we're looking at is work trucks primarily, as well as what we call upfits or conversions.
Catherine Dubut [00:02:20]:
So anytime you see a truck with some sort of mechanism in the back of the bed. That may be specific to a trade or an industry that is considered an upfit. When we talk about vans, those are also used by various industries to do work, essentially. So if you're an electrician, you might need some specific configurations within your van that would be different from someone who has a delivery delivery business. The range is wide in terms of how people use their fleets, big and small. You know, that full range, I think that's the most interesting thing about it, because small businesses run America. And so when you think about that, the scale and opportunity to impact that group of people, that's huge. It's just approached differently than say, a regular consumer who might just be interested in a vehicle at a dealership and go and purchase it through there.
Catherine Dubut [00:03:18]:
But with the fleet business, there's a lot more complexity.
Chris Strahl [00:03:21]:
Right. So your customer isn't just one person. Your customer is like a whole company's worth of people or sometimes a government's worth of people.
Catherine Dubut [00:03:28]:
Yeah. So what's interesting about this is on the smaller end, you know, we might have just one person doing everything on the small, medium businesses, but if you go to the larger businesses or governments or agencies, they're going to have potentially multiple end users, so to speak. So someone who might be in the procurement side and then someone who might be actually managing the fleet, and then you have to consider as well the drivers. So there's different perspectives and therefore different journey maps across that. When we think about a quote, unquote customer, it's just not the same as a consumer at all.
Chris Strahl [00:04:05]:
And this is also a complex environment that's made more complex by the fact that also happens globally. Yes. Like, yes, small business is the backbone of America. It's also the backbone of a bunch of other countries that are also a lot of your customers. And there's a lot of complexity in those relationships, I'm sure as well.
Catherine Dubut [00:04:21]:
Yes. I don't want to be US centric about this. We do have about 20 and growing global markets. For instance, in Europe, there's going to be different legal considerations, things around data that we need to be working with our teams to understand better what's needed there, as well as localization considerations. So every time we look at a market, we look at what kinds of languages, what kinds of legal considerations we need to have and support from a digital perspective, and then also understanding just how the nuances of a particular market might be run differently depending on how they do business. What's interesting about our different markets is everyone's on a different Trajectory around electric vehicles, around incentives. When we talk about what kinds of financial considerations need to be had, as well as just how businesses are run. So for instance, how might these businesses get financing, for example, depending on how small or big they are.
Catherine Dubut [00:05:28]:
So there's just a lot of different aspects to consider. And I'm constantly still learning. I've been there for three years and I'm always uncovering new discoveries about the complexity and the scale. I think that's the biggest thing is the scale that you're talking about. It's not just one country. We have to consider many countries. And then from our team's perspective, we're looking at if we build something, how can we make it scalable, extensible and future proofing
Chris Strahl [00:05:56]:
Yeah, that's what I wanted to get to. I think it is really fascinating the complexity of the business and in particular just the idea that something that's such a well known brand, a household name certainly in pretty much every place in America, thinking about that from a much different viewpoint that I'm sure you even struggle to communicate internally as to like how Ford Pro is different than the generalized Ford brand, how does that manifest in your digital product landscape? So when you think about like all the stuff that you work on, all the ones and zeros that ultimately represent what consumers interact with, in your case, your consumers being businesses or governments or whomever, what does that look like in terms of that complexity?
Catherine Dubut [00:06:39]:
The commercial business itself has been around for decades. We launched a new brand, ford Pro, in 2021 and that was right before I joined the following year. But there had been a historically fragmented experience for our end customers. So to put a point on that, there were about 80 plus individual websites of varying sizes. You know, PDF link uploaded here, a full featured kind of tool over here, many of them on different tech stacks or legacy code. And when the brand was introduced, we were essentially tasked with consolidating to create one Ford Pro platform experience for dozens of markets and languages.
Chris Strahl [00:07:26]:
Yeah, no problem.
Catherine Dubut [00:07:28]:
Yeah, no problem. So we're about, I would say 80% of the way there. That last 15 to 20% is a huge, huge chunk of functionality. But we've made a lot of headway. But some of it was like, okay, what is here? What is the impact? Is it brochures? You know, just upload it, can we digitize it? Some of it was that, some of it was okay, this is on old technology. We need to modernize this.
Chris Strahl [00:07:55]:
From a code perspective, you can imagine something that's been around for decades. The idea of what Technical debt skeletons lurk inside of those platforms has got to be like, somewhat horrifying. And I won't, I won't make you get into it because like, every company has this and nobody likes to admit it, but it's one of those situations where eventually we all have to self examine the things that we've built over the past two decades and say, like, how do we actually unify any of this? And I can imagine that's a very daunting challenge.
Catherine Dubut [00:08:24]:
It absolutely was. I mean, Ford's one of the oldest companies here in the US and when you think about not just the technology, but the processes and the way that people do business internally, that you kind of compound that into one big, let's just say mess, you know, credit to our leadership, though. They recognized that. They recognized the need to modernize, to bring people on board who had a software background or technology background who could help figure out how to do this. It's not easy. In my past career history, I maybe did one or two migrations at one role here we've done so many. I would say we're actually pretty darn good at figuring this out at this point. That doesn't make it easier, but a lot of it is understanding, hey, this tool's coming from this team.
Catherine Dubut [00:09:16]:
Can we understand what this team is trying to do? What's their business? How can we make sure we don't negatively impact it? What does that look like when we start to build out a plan for them to migrate in? And you know, it's not just the actual work, it's also like a huge mindset shift for the company, particularly in the pro side. But when we talk about design systems and shared libraries, we were also not starting from a really clear path forward. An older derived system that was unmanaged and wasn't really built for our software interactions that we knew we needed to have as part of our product ecosystem.
Chris Strahl [00:09:55]:
So when you think about all of that that you're managing at once there and trying to sort of like normalize all this, I guess that's maybe the right word. I don't know. It's kind of like it's this big fractured landscape that you're trying to create like level ground around. A big part of this was also like, now enters the design system system. And I think this is interesting because you're simultaneously trying to do an understanding of the landscape you have across these 80 different digital properties. And you're also trying to say, like, here's a way that we can introduce consistency across them. And we're going to all do this with a design system which, like, you know, look, this is the design systems podcast. We believe very heavily in that mindset.
Chris Strahl [00:10:41]:
But that's also a lot of change all at once. And that's a gigantic journey. Kind of take me through the thought process on how you go build like a team tools system for something like that.
Catherine Dubut [00:10:57]:
Yeah. So as you can imagine with those 80 plus sites, we had inconsistent UI across all these applications and modules and whatever they were at that time. Also these teams were autonomously building these things. So there was no line of communication, I think, between design and development. And then we would uncover different pieces of work that had been almost kind of started to overlap in other areas. And so that's really worrisome, right, because we're trying to really streamline how we as a company do that work. And I mentioned that the older unmanaged design system that didn't allow for that complex software interactions. And so essentially it was like hard coded design.
Catherine Dubut [00:11:44]:
There was no single source of truth for design elements for the commercial business. The other thing was that we had relied on external agencies to get us through up till that point. So when I joined, we quickly recognized, oh, we need a common design system that we can rally around. So we hired a leader. I just want to give a shout out to Jackie Hollenbeck. She's their fearless leader. There were many others who have contributed along the way. So we actually started out with part agency and part internal designers.
Catherine Dubut [00:12:15]:
And now we're at the point where we're all internal. But with the lack of resources at that time, we really needed some help to kind of get the ball rolling, to get that factory going, that assembly line, because we were building it from nothing. Nothing really. I mean, you could derive some bits from like the brand team and from the older system, but we also needed to look at, okay, well, what type of functionality are we even talking about and what are the limits of the system? It wasn't necessarily like we were inventing anything really new in that regard, because these are like common web standards and frameworks. But the actual understanding of like the scope of what it needed to be was really vast and unknown at the start.
Chris Strahl [00:13:04]:
I love the parallels with Henry Ford and the assembly line and everything like that too. I think it's a fun way of describing this. Right, because it's not like Ford really invented how to make an automobile. Ford just made it so that it worked at scale. And there were a lot of innovations that came along the way from that. But like Cars existed before the assembly line did. It's just that like you did, to create a way to operationalize all that. And the interesting part about this is like it kind of gets into what your mandate was, was build the assembly line for the way that we think about digital.
Chris Strahl [00:13:39]:
And that to me is super interesting because you basically said like, oh look, you know, we know how to make digital properties. Like we made 80 of them. And so now how do we make all those things work together in a way that is greater than its individual parts? And that's what really like the systems approach was about. I can imagine that you're leaning on agencies, you're leaning on new people, new hires, new leadership. What kind of systems did you have to put in place that are beyond technology that really helped prop that up and make it work?
Catherine Dubut [00:14:14]:
I mean it was as simple as process. So how do we methodically go through what we believe are foundational pieces of a design system that also match our requirements and do the research, the desk research that we need to look across other design systems out there in the wild. Do the research to understand the brand Ford Pro, which is separate from Ford in that regard, and do the research to understand what kinds of, like I mentioned, other functionalities we're going to have to support. So that's a lot of work. Right. All the while you've got 60 designers chomping at the bit for this. You know, they're working in older systems. They're also chomping at the bit to get into figma, which we were doing that transition at the time from Sketch.
Chris Strahl [00:15:06]:
Yeah, because this is the other thing is like you're going through like tooling, modernization at the same time.
Catherine Dubut [00:15:11]:
Yes. I mean our organization was. There were various reasons why, but. Yeah, and also getting people up to speed on what is a design system. Not everyone has experience with working with the design system. So what we had to do was introduce the componentry just as it was and then start to build in the documentation guidelines. How do you adjust a new component or how would you theoretically adjust a component or provide a suggestion? And they also did a lot of work to create a clear governance model for not just designers, but also product owners and developers to follow. We also spent a lot of time, a lot, a lot of time just developing a really strong relationship with the dev team that builds the components.
Catherine Dubut [00:16:02]:
That was super, super important for this to be successful. Once we had a group of foundational components, essentially we ran a two month pilot with a feature team because we were like, we need to test this we need to see what are the problems, what are the pain points. The team also does a lot of like qualitative. They want to know if the system is going to be useful. And so that's just something that they've built in from the start, which is amazing. I think what was really great about this particular experience as we were developing this is we had the buy in from the start, which I can't say the same for previous places where, where I worked at, where you'd spend two years trying to communicate the value of why we need to do this work. We had kind of the flip side of this and they built a design system in record time, I would say, just because of how I'd seen it play out in other organizations.
Chris Strahl [00:16:56]:
Hey everyone, I'd like to take a quick break and tell you about Knapsack's leadership summits. Every month we host an exclusive in person event in different cities all around the country, bringing together design, engineering and product leaders. These summits are all about sharing our learning with tailored discussions to address the challenges you're facing. The best part, it's totally free. Head over to Knapsack Cloud events to find an upcoming summit near you and apply to join us. We'd love to see you there. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that that was inverted? Was that just a value system of the business? Was that a mandate from leadership? Like where did that come from that made that fast?
Catherine Dubut [00:17:33]:
Yeah, I mean I have really supportive leadership in terms of us wanting to do things the right way. I think also the problem statement itself really lended to a design system to bring consistency, coherency, guidance across because we just didn't have any of that. In that sense, you know, teams were very siloed, not talking to each other. Designers didn't even know other designers existed on neighboring teams. So I think even just the landscape when I was hired in was really just like a unique proposition. The other thing that's interesting about the business too is it's not just about the vehicle. We're talking about software and connected vehicles related to electric vehicles. In particular, we're talking about charging solutions for those electric vehicles, financing options.
Catherine Dubut [00:18:30]:
I talked about how might a company go and finance a fleet of vehicles if they don't have the money right out. So all those different things, service as well is a huge component.
Chris Strahl [00:18:40]:
Yeah, I mean all the stuff with the consumer purchase, but like even more so.
Catherine Dubut [00:18:45]:
Even more so. So when we thought about the scale of this, what we're talking about is how do I manage my fleet. It's not just how do I manage my vehicle, but how do I make sure that I'm tracking how many vehicles need to have service right away versus like I've subscribed to this software, when do I need to pay my bill, for example? It's more about the data essentially. And how does someone keep track of 5,000 vehicles, for example? The problem area itself kind of lended it to a design system that would bring about that. And I think part of it is like, you know, my leadership team, myself, we have backgrounds in this, so we knew that this would be a much easier way to get everyone on the same page. It was like recognized right out the gate. So definitely was really helpful. And like I said, that really did kind of change up this experience from my past experiences where the actual design part is the easier part, but getting buy in is probably the hardest.
Chris Strahl [00:19:48]:
Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing that everybody always thinks about when they think about like large scale systems like this big undertakings, it's like the budget side of things, right? Because you're also in a situation where like with 80 products, that's probably 80 different budgets. And I mean, I'm sure some of those are like decades old and people are like, why are we spending a bunch of money on a product that's been around for decades? So talk to me about how the money side went in as transparent a way as you can be. Because I am curious when you think about like, how do you sell this through as like, we're going to go make a big investment here and that big investment is going to be across a lot of different investments that we've already made as an organization. What does the results of that look like? And it seems like you had at least buy in culturally, contextually. But oftentimes when somebody with like a finance background looks at this, they look at it much more like a spreadsheet than they do like a culture initiative.
Catherine Dubut [00:20:41]:
Well, this is really interesting because our team is actually really great at maturing and tracking the metrics, which is something that I encourage anyone in the design profession to get really comfortable with. It's not easy because it's not something that is necessarily taught when you go for your design education or your training. So what's interesting to us is that we've been really able to utilize things like GitHub and Figma to track the usage. The way that I think about this is the impact of the design system. So we're looking at 80% reduction in design times, fewer inconsistencies accessibility is really big and important at Ford and we've improved our accessibility by starting at the Atom level of the component to be accessible. That doesn't remove that overall page and website accessibility lens that we need to have. But at a component level at its base, we can ensure that it's meeting a certain standard. And then we've been able to track how many teams are using it in Ford Pro.
Catherine Dubut [00:21:53]:
So that's like about 80 teams. We've got outside teams who are interested in using it. You know, I just got a request today where they've seen, oh, I can't use this outdated system, but yours has what I need. And so we do have teams reaching out that we haven't heard of yet. And so we need to understand, okay, what is it going to take to integrate you into the stack? What levels of effort? How is this tool contributing to the business?
Chris Strahl [00:22:20]:
So one of the things that you talked about or mentioned earlier on that I think is an interesting technical aspect of what you've done is this idea of what was the bridge to full use and full adoption of Capone Tree and this idea of like, how micro front ends played a huge role in the way that you rolled out the design system across these products. So I'm familiar with the micro front end, but I would love it if you described what that means to you and then also talked a little bit about, like, how this works, because I think this is an interesting way of approaching this problem and I've never heard of micro frontends used quite at this scale before. It's an interesting kind of avenue from a technical angle to look at how this all works.
Catherine Dubut [00:23:02]:
Yes, it has also been a learning journey for me as well. Essentially it's a way to render different views of technology into the same frontend. So when we think about the different business units that we integrate their products or their features into our system, they may not exactly have the same stack. But what we might say is, hey, take a look at our design system. Please use the components that work for you, even if they're not necessarily connected into our library. So it could be as simple as I call it. Ford Pro is sizing some of these things because it could be as simple as slap a logo on. And that's what we're going to get because of the technology versus something where we really want to make sure it's really seamless.
Catherine Dubut [00:23:55]:
So, for example, there's a business unit called Ford Credit and we utilize some of their tooling into our website. But it's not that obvious to the end user that it is. I mean, you're going to find some quirks if you've got a good eye for it. But essentially we work with those different teams to understand how feasible is it to get into our platform, what modifications do they need to make? You know, when I talk about these different teams who are really interested in getting into our website and integrating into our stack, they also have to acknowledge that we need to consider all of the different markets that we might roll out to, any translations that need to happen, any connections to data that we need to consider. And so we've got a couple different teams that we work with to make that assessment. Like I said, it's not just about the actual thing that you're moving, but it's also about the processes that sit behind it. Because some teams are going to be more interested in changing their processes to modernize and some teams may find some challenges with it just because of how they've been set up in the past. We spend a lot of time with these teams trying to understand what are their KPIs like, what are they trying to accomplish, how can we think about different ways of thinking about it? Teams, they see the website and they think, okay, that's what I want.
Catherine Dubut [00:25:15]:
But maybe they don't know how to articulate how they want to do it. And so our job is to listen to them and understand where their needs are and figuring out what can we take and learn from and what can we reuse and what can we learn from these teams who have already spent time in this business or in that particular area.
Chris Strahl [00:25:38]:
Yeah, I love the kind of two sided nature of that because in one front you get the opportunity to learn a lot about how those different business units operate and the other side you get to include them in that modernization. And so there's always this big conversation about how do you get value out of that digital product. Right. Especially that one that was built a decade ago. And so by looking at a micro front end concept and basically saying like, hey, look, we can bring in a bunch of different capabilities from all these different places into a single front end application, that's another way of learning about how those apps are used and also being able to leverage them in new and interesting ways to get value out of and them in the organization. And I think that's super interesting.
Catherine Dubut [00:26:21]:
It's definitely messy, that's for sure. I'm not trying to sugarcoat it because a lot of it is about the dynamics with the different teams and being empathetic. To what they've experienced previously.
Chris Strahl [00:26:33]:
Yeah, I mean, I can't even imagine where like some of the integration challenges you run into in situations like that, yet, you know, you've made it work at scale. And I think that that's a testament to the way your team has thought about systems and the way you thought about, like, how you've been implementing this. And now here you are roughly four years into your journey and it's exciting to see how far you've made it. When you think about those micro front ends as this bridge to this, like promised land of everything using the components in the design system, what do you kind of view as like the step in the journey you're on now? What is it that you're working on at this moment that's leading you towards that path?
Catherine Dubut [00:27:12]:
Adoption has been a huge thing this year and making sure that teams understand how they can use the system. So what that also has meant is some refinement on some of the processes, the documentation, the components themselves, things like naming conventions between figma and code. We need more consistency. You know, we exceeded our original adoption goals, but. But we also need to shift to how Ford Pro is generally expanding in terms of the scope and the evolution of certain business decisions and those sorts of things. So there's a lot of ways that we're looking at right now to demonstrate and articulate impact. So things like dollars saved efficiencies across design and dev. I mentioned earlier that the team has done a great job of collecting qualitative feedback from the designers and internal team.
Catherine Dubut [00:28:06]:
So there's a lot of adjustment that's going on right now. And now that we've got this really solid foundation of the system, we're looking at other ways to enhance it. How do we add a little bit more creative to some of the marketing aspects where some of those components are used? And then also how are we thinking about the evolution of the site when we think about our plans and adjusting for that in the long run? Because the business is shifting. It's already shifted in the last few years just because of where the automotive industry is right now. It's just such a dynamic time.
Chris Strahl [00:28:43]:
I imagine this year has been a little hectic.
Catherine Dubut [00:28:47]:
It's been a little hectic for sure. And then when you think about like electric vehicles, it's constantly changing literally every week. So we're always adjusting from the business side of things. And so the design system team is on that journey along with us to learn and understand, okay, what is our value Prop as a business, digital tends to be the place now where people coalesce and see what they want to see in terms of the brand. So how do we provide the building blocks for that?
Chris Strahl [00:29:18]:
I love the vision. This was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time. This has been a fantastic podcast and I just want to say thank you very much for being on the show.
Catherine Dubut [00:29:27]:
Thank you very much, Chris. I really enjoyed being on with you.
Chris Strahl [00:29:30]:
So if you like this conversation and you want to hear more like it, we are probably hosting a Patterns event in your city. You can go to Knapsack.cloud/patterns to check out where the dates and locations of all of our upcoming events are. Again, if you want to chat with somebody like Catherine face to face, it's a great opportunity to connect with peers in your network, in the industry and to just generally get a little bit more time to chat about stuff like this. So if you're interested, we'd love to have you go ahead and jump on that URL and apply again. That's Knapsack.cloud/patterns. Catherine, I want to say thank you one more time for being on the show. Really appreciate you excellent time learning about all the cool stuff you've been doing and I hope you have a very successful next step as you're on this journey.
Catherine Dubut [00:30:10]:
Thank you so much, Chris. Really, really had a great time.
Chris Strahl [00:30:13]:
This has been the Design System Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Have a great day, everyone. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Design Systems podcast. If you have any questions, topic suggestions, or want to share feedback, go ahead and reach to us on LinkedIn. Our profile is linked in the show notes. As always, the podcast is brought to you by Knapsack.
Chris Strahl [00:30:29]:
Check us out at Knapsack Cloud. Have a great day, everyone.