How to manage a design system

As a product manager, you need to be able to maintain design consistency across your offerings. However, as your products evolve and scale this becomes increasingly more challenging. To this end, strive to treat your design system as more than just a project.

This article explores your role in shaping and scaling a design system, including how to understand user needs, ways to secure leadership buy-in, and where to implement value.

User need analysis

To start building a design system you need to run a component audit. This helps you understand what your products have for your design system to serve. Work with the product teams in your organization to list out all existing components.

The process can be tedious but it pays off later. Be sure to pay attention to the components, their categories, their quantities, and the design inconsistencies between the components.

Market research

Good product managers understand market trends, as well as the products they own. There are tons of design systems to learn from. Some of the open-source ones include:

• Material Design — An open-source design system from Google. It also provides “Material UI,” a React component library that implements this design system
• Carbon Design System — IBM’s open-source design system. It supports multiple code implementations

Some design system teams build their component library based on the open source libraries. In this case, remember to ensure what framework the open-source component library supports. For instance, Material UI, provided by Google, works better with the React javascript framework than the Angular javascript framework.

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Cross-functional collaboration

Alongside user needs and market research, you need to drive cross-functional collaboration. Communicate with various team leaders to align the design language including color, typography, iconography, sizing, and spacing. In many organizations, marketing owns the company’s brand image and may have a style guide. Be sure to connect with the marketing team to align the design language as well.

Besides these, remember the following two best practices:

• Buy-in from leadership — To help teams adopt, getting buy-ins from leadership is the most straightforward. They can become champions, and help you advocate for adoption
• Scaling — As the team scales from a centralized model to a federated model, talk to people managers and assemble the workforce to govern and contribute to the system

Product roadmap

Because a design system is a product, make sure that you design out a product roadmap for it. As you do this, pay attention to three critical factors:

Dependencies

While building the design system, start with the smaller components, which have fewer dependencies on other components. For instance, you might not want to start with the “menu” component even though it may be the first component your users interact with. The menu component has dependencies on other components, such as paper, popper, select, typography, color, and divider, and they would need to be defined beforehand.

Component demand

Different companies offer different kinds of services or products. Hence, the demand for components also varies. For instance, data input components (text field, dropdown, radio buttons, checkbox, etc.) can be in higher demand if the product portfolio contains all kinds of forms.

Organizational strategy

Another crucial factor is the priority of the features/products and their needs among all the other features/products in your company’s product portfolio. It’s especially important when your organization is building the design system and adopting the components at the same time.

Scope management

You might have heard feedback like “Why don’t we include these awesome buttons on the card component as I designed?” or “Can we add infinite scrolling in the table component?”

When it comes to design systems, consider these questions to help you determine whether a request is important enough to prioritize:

• Can this requested feature/component be used across all products in the company’s product portfolio?
• Is this requested feature/component aligned with our high-level guidelines and vision?

Remember, it’s impossible to include everything! You play a key role in avoiding scope creep.

Implementation and adoption

The final stages of a design system involve implementation and adoption. There are three important things to watch for here:

Go-to-market

Building a design system is just a start. To ensure your design system is adopted, you should run:

• Demos — Hold demos for a variety of teams where you advocate for the design system, take feedback, and answer questions
• Office hours — Provide office hours to support your design system and let teams collaborate in a structured way

Customer success

Great product managers listen to their customers/users and solve their problems. In the context of the design system as a product, the customers are the product teams that consume the components.

Customer success takes place through:

• Community channels — These are safe places for design system users to interact with one another, including the design system team. A great feedback loop fosters a culture of team collaboration. Tools could include Slack, MS Teams, Atlassian Confluence, or Discord
• Bug reports and feature requests — It’s unrealistic to expect a perfect design system. Chances are you release “minimum viable components” and then follow up with additional iterations after. Create issue templates for your repository in a software like Github

Metric measurement

To measure the success of the design system, you also need to track the metrics of the performance. You want to know how well the design system does and demonstrate the values it provides. Start tracking with:

• Qualitative analysis — Surveys for internal teams and end-users
• Quantitative metrics — Traffic on your site, Adoption rate, and ROI (reduced code changes, time/cost saved per component, etc)

Final thoughts

Building a design system is a complex but rewarding journey, and treating it as a product that serves other products is key to its success. Your design system should be well-designed and aligned with the broader business and user needs.

Like any product, you need a strong strategy, clear vision, and strong alignment between users, stakeholders, and business objectives. Act as a steward to help teams prioritize components, manage dependencies, and maintain focus on your long-term organizational strategy.

Featured image source: IconScout

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