I presented this project at the DesignOps 2022 conference in Denver, CO. You can read that talk here: Design System Maturity Levels.

Introduction

In the Fall of 2019, our product design team quickly grew from 3 to 10 designers, embedded across five major product teams. Concerned with maintaining product consistency and wanting to decrease development cycles as we redesigned our product suite, we knew it was time to reboot our company design system.

One year in, we’ve learned a lot about building and scaling our UI patterns. You can read about those lessons in my blog. By pulling back the curtain on what worked and what didn’t work we hope to help other teams on their similar journeys. We also encourage teams to stick with it. A design system shouldn’t be a project. It should be treated as a product with a roadmap, backlog, customer feedback sessions, and ongoing iterations.

Getting Started

In early 2019 our previous design system had grown stale, and after a few false starts to get it revived I knew the first step was getting somebody with previous experience to quarterback the effort. By the time Brian Clay joined we only had a system, Kyper (named for the Kuiper Belt, an area of the Solar System containing comets, asteroids, and other small ice planets.)

In the classic management book Good to Great author Jim Collins discusses the importance of getting the right people in the right seats on the bus. That has certainly proven true in this case. Brian has been an invaluable asset to the team in building out our system, owning the system roadmap, and helping get the rest of the internal teams aligned.