Vernon’s Reviews > Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice > Status Update

Design system teams are really good at standardizing things and abstracting them. Product teams are really good at inventing new things and being able to use them in their products to meet their deadlines and to create customer value.

“Creating a design system in a vacuum and then trying to plug it into an organization’s rapidly moving product design process rarely works.”

The driving question you should try to answer is, “What three components could other teams use right now?”

“If you’re constantly using words like create, generate, or define, your team might have too much of a propensity to see themselves as the authority than they should, and you’re probably in for an uphill journey in adoption.”

“The driving question is, “What do we need to be able to make with our design system?”

“The design system team is trying to solve problems of consistency, but product teams are mostly trying to meet their already aggressive deadlines. Anything that might slow them down—like investing time and mental space in learning a new tool—is considered a nonstarter.”

“How can you move your organization toward a more connected system?”

“Downloading files is working with duplicates; it’s your own copy of the original set of files. Downloading means you have your own version, which means the version of Bootstrap [or whatever] in your files isn’t connected to the official version of Bootstrap anymore.”

“Most design systems fail because they aren’t integrated early enough into the grain of how an organization operates”