Lessons from five years of design systems

I've been building and maintaining design systems for about five years now. Different companies, different scales, different challenges. Here's what I wish I'd known at the start.

1. Adoption beats perfection

Your system is only as good as its adoption rate. A messy system that everyone uses beats a polished system that collects dust. Optimize for adoption first, polish later.

This means meeting teams where they are. Supporting their existing workflows. Making migration gradual instead of all-or-nothing.

2. Documentation is product

Treat your documentation like a product. It has users. It needs UX. It needs to be maintained. Bad documentation is worse than no documentation because it erodes trust.

Every component needs three things: when to use it, when not to use it, and working code examples. Everything else is optional.

3. Governance is the hard part

Building components is the easy part. The hard part is governance. Who decides what goes in the system? How do you handle requests? What's the process for breaking changes?

Without clear governance, you get chaos. Teams building their own components. Duplicate patterns. Inconsistency everywhere. Define the rules early.

4. You need champions, not mandates

You can't force adoption through mandates. You need champions. People on each team who believe in the system and advocate for it.

Find these people. Support them. Give them early access to new components. Listen to their feedback. They're your distribution channel.

5. Start with what hurts

Don't try to systematize everything at once. Start with the things that cause the most pain. The button that's been redesigned six times. The form pattern that's different on every page. The color that nobody can agree on.

Fix real pain and people will trust you to fix more.

6. Expect to throw things away

Your first version will be wrong. Your naming will be wrong. Your API will be wrong. This is fine. Build with the expectation that you'll need to change things.

Version your system. Communicate changes clearly. Make migration as painless as possible. The system that can evolve beats the system that's "right" from the start.

The long game

Design systems are a long game. The benefits compound over time, but so does the maintenance burden. Build something you can sustain, not something impressive that falls apart.