A design system's first version is always the easy part. The real test comes six months in, when two product teams need the same button component to behave slightly differently, and someone has to decide whether that's a variant or a fork.
We've found the systems that hold up share one trait: they document intent, not just appearance. A button component's spec should say what it's for, not only what it looks like so the next person extending it knows whether a new use case fits the existing pattern or genuinely needs something new.
The systems that die are the ones treated as a Figma file handed to engineering once and never revisited. Ownership has to be shared and versioned like code, because that's effectively what it is.
- Design Systems
- UI/UX
Written by Maria Barwaniwala
Design Director at HASANI.
