Shipping new ways of working to a classic organization with the One UPS system, with Marcela Rodriguez Joos

Author

Elyse Holladay
April 14, 2025 • time to read: ~7 minutes

Read on for a peek into the episode.

Marcela Rodriguez Joos shares the story behind the One UPS project, a massive effort to modernize and unify UPS’ brand and digital experiences through a new design system. Marcela reveals how a “why does everything look different?” moment from their CEO was the catalyst for this ambitious effort, how they’re collaborating across a massive org, and successfully reducing development timelines from years down to months. Plus, Marcela’s team dishes out their design system spice takes!

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Marcela:

But it wasn't until 2020, we had a new CEO. And Carol Tomé came in, and she's looking at everything and diving in, trying to learn about UPS and getting well versed in all areas. And she asks, why does everything look different?

And I'm like, funny you should ask, right? Like we all ask the same thing. We had posters on the wall that would say this is One UPS. But every instance looked very different and disconnected. Everything was just very disparate.

And so she was really a catalyst, right? And she was the one that basically said, okay, this should be a priority.

So around that time, we began establishing the Center of Design Excellence, and it was really to help support all the various teams that were creating digital products, and established this new way of working, then really rally around experience design. Because in the past, UPS never had internal resources dedicated to these tracks. We always leaned on vendors and other support to come in for those stints of time, but we never really had a design community inside of UPS.

And so with that, obviously we started talking about design systems, looking at different design systems, figuring out what we needed, and how we need to support this revamping the site yet again. We were taking advantage of a migration.

And here we are! We have [our] 4. 0 design system, now the official UPS design system.

And so that that leadership decision was really what enabled us to create this design system. And now we have a full dedicated team to it, and it's propagating through all of our experience.

Elyse:

There's two things that are just so important. When you were talking about the CEO being like, why does everything look different? This is important, why aren't you going after it? But having somebody like the CEO notice and think that's important is the catalyst to be able to go after that, and to be able to talk about that in a way that matters to the whole organization.

But it takes a catalyst. There's always a reason. And sometimes that reason has to be C suite, or major migration or refactor, or major pivot, or like some other kind of crisis moment where it becomes very clear that this actually is worth investing in, because up until that point, there's always other priorities and other things that are more important.

So tell us what is the One UPS project? What does that encompass?

Marcela:

So One UPS is in essence rallying around our design language. And as we reestablished our design language in alignment with our brand guidelines, ensuring that we are representing the brand in the right way, in the right tone, with our flavor, right? Who do we want to be, like similar to Coca Cola. Like when you see something Coca Cola, you instantly recognize it. And there's so many other global brands that you're just like, I don't need to see your logo, I know who you are.

And I think part of that is what that UPS initiative is intended to be. It doesn't matter that you are looking at ups.com or going to one of our subsidiaries, or partner sites, but it intrinsically feels [the same], and not only feels, but it also enables you to interact with it, with connection that I'm not in different sites doing different things.

Obviously our roadmap is pretty… big.

Because it's not just about, hey, the design system is dictating this, but it's like, what do we need to do to support all of these experiences? Each site has made very intentional decisions. And nobody is discrediting any of that, right? There's been thorough thought, there's been tons of time, there's been designers and developers and strategists and marketers working on all of these projects.

And so it's not about coming in and bulldozing it, but it's about, okay, let's make those connections. Let's figure out what we need to do in order to support each other and grow together. Because if we can have those good conversation, then we can get so much more out of this relationship.

Elyse:

Yeah. I think when you say, the roadmap is big, that might be a little bit of an understatement!

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