La mesa rv: Building a high-traffic legacy retail experience
Product Designer · Oct '24 – Today
La Mesa RV is one of the largest RV dealerships in the US, a 600K plus monthly visit website built on legacy workflows with no design system or prior product design function.
When I joined, I was the first designer across Marketing, Sales, and Inventory. My role was to understand the system I was walking into, identify where to intervene first, and build a foundation that everything else could grow from.
Context
I was working across three teams, with no existing design system or tooling in place. This meant constantly switching between systems with very different definitions of what “working” looked like.
Projects
Process
I started with discovery sessions across teams to understand what was actually broken. Design moved in sprint based iterations, with regular check ins with PMs and engineering to validate decisions early.
Technical constraints were considered alongside design. Design system was built with tokens and structured components, and handoff was continuous through close collaboration with engineers.
@La Mesa RV
Working as the sole designer meant balancing multiple teams and priorities at once while building process and product in parallel. I had to constantly switch contexts across teams, adapting to shifting requirements without losing system consistency.
I worked closely with the tech team, which made it possible to move quickly and align on complex constraints early. Over time, the role evolved from designing features to shaping connected systems across the business.