# PJ Onori > Design systems since 2011. Not an expert. Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/pjonori My twenty year career has been spread across agencies, product companies of all sizes and co-founder. Design systems have been my full focus for the past decade. In that time, I've spent the majority building systems practices from zero (or near-zero) to one. I've had the opportunity to take on nearly every facet of design systems–I've designed, developed, product managed and people managed them. My contributions can be seen most notably at Disney, Pinterest and Instacart. Even after nearly ten years of working on design systems, there's endless more to learn about the practice. I keep track of what I've picked up along the way at https://pjonori.blog. ## Work Experience ### Principal Designer @ Sanity Jan 2025 – Present ### Sr. Design Manager, Design Systems @ Instacart Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 Defined and executed on a long-term direction for design systems at Instacart–with the following highlights from 2024 to 2025: Grew the design system team's size and impact * Established team KPIs and success measures * Expanded the size of the team by 3.5x * Expanded the footprint of the design system's business coverage by 4x Spearheaded Instacart's first ever design technologist practice * Hired Instacart's first three design technologist roles * Established the company's design technologist role definition and its core competencies Dramatically increased component availability and usage within products * Moved the percentage of coded components available on all platforms from 11% to 47% * Increased the monthly average Figma component inserts by 197% * Increased the percentage of Figma component inserts fully available in code from 54% to 76% Streamlined support systems to increase efficiency * Increased monthly average page views of team documentation by 223% * Increased monthly average unique views of team documentation by 265% * Decreased volume of Slack support messages by 7% Improved overall internal sentiment of the design system * Moved design overall sentiment by ~44 points in the first six months * Increases in mobile engineering sentiment by ~4 points to achieve over 96% overall favorability ### Sr. Design Manager, Design Systems @ PayPal Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 It's a long story. ### Design Manager, Gestalt Design System (part deux) @ Pinterest Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 Transitioned back into people management while continuing to own the vision of strategic direction of Gestalt. ### Lead Product Designer / Product Owner, Gestalt Design System @ Pinterest Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 Owned the vision and strategy for the Gestalt design system; leading to signficant increases in adoption and customer sentiment. Highlights: - 32% increase in designer sentiment of Gestalt compared to 2022. - 11% increase in total Gestalt component instances in the web codebase compared to 2022. - 28% increase in higher-order Gestalt component instances in the web codebase compared to 2022. - 92% increase in Gestalt docs pageviews from 2022 to 2023. ### Design Manager, Gestalt Design System @ Pinterest Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area Led the transition of the team to be a fully-staffed, cross-functional design systems practice. Highlights - Grew the team and shifted its focus/skillset to be exclusively centered on design systems - Developed a multi-year vision/roadmap for growing the systems practice at Pinterest - Led the effort to shift Gestalt from functioning primarily as a UI framework to Pinterest's design system - Acted as product owner which included responsibilities of defining/tracking OKRs, developing baseline KPIs to define success and developing yearly roadmaps to meet stakeholder needs - Oversaw growth of the system with substantial gains in adoption as well as NPS scores in nearly every category measured - Expanded the influence/scope of Gestalt to extend its reach and customer base ### Lead Product Designer, Design Systems @ Pinterest Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Acted as lead designer in Pinterest's internal design system, design tooling and infrastructure initiatives. Highlights - Led the design and supported the implementation of Dark Mode for the company's iOS and Android apps - Defined and facilitated the implementation of design tokens within the system - Developed internal tooling through Figma plugins and web apps to operationalize / automate key manual design workflows - Developed processes within the team to enable measurement of team velocity and provided the ability for the team to accurately forecast team throughput ### Principal Designer @ Disney Streaming Services Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Responsibilities - Led the design effort for Disney Streaming Services' platform tool suite - Initiated and led the creation of Disney Streaming Services' platform design system ### Design-Driven Product Manager @ InVisionApp Inc Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 Highlights - Managed the initial launch of InVision LABS/Craft. - Led InVision’s Inspect and Craft Sync initiatives. Responsibilities - Product definition, KPIs, prioritization and roadmap creation. - Communication/coordination with all business/operational stakeholders. - Management and involvement in the design effort for Inspect and Craft Sync. - Definition of business/functional acceptance criteria for engineering tickets. - Validation research for Inspect and Craft Sync in the form of customer interviews, creation of surveys and quantitative analysis. - Planning, creation and management of all customer communication through the Inspect and Craft Sync beta programs prior to our hiring of a product marketing manager. - Occasional coding when resources are thin. ### Partner, Director of Design Technology @ Waybury Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Worked on a range of consulting projects ranging from focused UX to interface design to iconography. Clients include: OpenTable, Twitter, Splunk, Intuit and Mulesoft. In addition, worked with the Waybury team to produce Iconic (https://useiconic.com/) and Relay (http://relay.io). Waybury was acquired by InVision in December 2015. ### Consultant @ Independent UX/Technology Consultancy Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 Assisted clients such as HOT Studio, Splunk and General Electric with problems ranging from pure user experience to technology-related challenges. ### Director of User Experience @ Seabright Studios Ltd. Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 ### Design Technologist @ Adaptive Path Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 Served in several capacities in the experience design process - from prototyping to design strategy to facilitating workshops (and everything in between). Worked for organizations such as the United Nations, Samsung and Adobe. ### Design Technologist @ Independent Consultancy Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 Worked as a design technology consultant to handle projects that demand visual/interactive design along with technical strategy and development. Recent projects I have been a part of are Patrón Tequila (patrontequila.com), Horizon Dairy (horizondairy.com), Stanlee Gatti's website (stanleegatti.com), internal kiosk applications and Current.com's Viewpoints experience (now offline). I have done work for companies such as Current TV, Adaptive Path, Hearst Corporation and Mekanism. ### Senior Design Technologist @ Method (www.method.com) Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 Acted as the senior design technologist, responsible for development of various Actionscript 2 and Actionscript 3 applications. Projects of interest were The Apartment's Flex-based Wordpress blog (http://theapt.com/broadcast) and TED.com's video player (http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/13). ### Web Designer @ Current TV Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 Acted as the lead front-end developer for Current TV's second generation website and video player from inception to launch. ### Senior Flash Developer @ SolutionSet Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 ### Web Developer @ Kacyra Family Foundation Jan 2003 – Jan 2005 ## Education ### BFA in Visual Arts University of San Francisco ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/pjonori - Portfolio: http://pjonori.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/pjonori JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/pjonori/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13