Design System in 90 Days

If you’re like most of our clients, you’re a design, engineering, or product leader, working at an enterprise organization on its second or third attempt at a design system that truly powers all of its digital products. In the first few tries, perhaps you ended up with some great libraries that just didn’t get used as much as you’d hoped. (We call those “design system graveyards.”).

Six months of work down the drain. Now, it seems like enthusiasm for the idea of a design system is fizzling out and your leadership wants to reallocate your design system team to other projects.

Create a design system teams love to use

It still feels within your grasp: a set of shared components all teams start with as an established part of their workflow.

• All the products look like they’re part of the same brand family and design language.
• All the engineers use similar code conventions and approaches; no more wasted meeting time and Slack threads deciding “what we should name this component.”
• Every team saves few weeks of work at minimum, because 80% of their product’s interface elements come from the design system, ready to rock. A few weeks of work becomes a few hours. A few hours of work becomes a few minutes.

They’re free to innovate, to solve more impactful business problems because they’re not custom-building yet another datepicker for the fifth time.

When the big rebrand or technology migration eventually comes around, you’d be ready. Change will be relatively painless, because you’ll be able to make modifications in one place that cascade out to every product with a few simple build commands.

If this is your first time marching toward this utopia, it can feel like stumbling around in the dark, messing up more than succeeding. You’re unknowingly headed toward yet another design system graveyard because you don’t know the steps, the process, the sequence.

You can create a design system in a way that involves your customers—really, your community—from the start. You’ll no longer feel behind, like you have to catch up and rein in the teams that can’t help but deviate from the system because there’s not enough of it there for them yet. Instead of policing other teams to keep them in line with the standards, your team becomes the one that propels them to boost the quality of their work. You’ll have clarity, and

It’s doable! Companies like Shopify, IBM, Lyft, REI, Atlassian, Microsoft, and more are living this reality. You can too.

Know exactly what you can do each day

The key is focusing relentlessly on adoption from Day 1 by systematically and intentionally including members of your team at every single stage of the process. You hold that as the focus for every activity you do by clearly understanding what teams need in a design system. And you iterate on it constantly and smartly in a way that scales and sticks.

Our Design System in 90 Days workbook will show your team exactly how to do that, every day from Day 1 to Day 90. We’ve spent the last few years workshopping this sequence of 52 activities. It’s a proven process that, when repeated over the next 90 days and beyond, plants seeds that can blossom into a healthy design system practice. These are the steps we’ve used with many enterprise teams to help them create digital products efficiently, consistently, and in a way that’s a lot of dang fun!