Design Systems and Happy Teams: Maximizing Resources for Success (Part 2: People)

This article is one of a three-part series on design systems and happy teams. Part 2 focuses on the people who contribute to and use your design systems and what we can do to ensure success and team happiness. Be sure to read Part 1, which introduces the concepts behind what makes design systems successful and teams happy. Part 3 will focus on success and team happiness around processes–how teams work together to create and maintain the design system.

When reflecting on your design system’s success and your team’s happiness, thinking about the welfare of the people who contribute is vital. To ensure success, consider how other organizations structure and staff their design system teams to see what changes you can make. We’ll cover additional recommendations based on our How We Document report, hopefully inspiring ways you can make the most of your organization’s situation.

In Part 1, where we introduce the concept of success, we mention the following principles:

• Reduce friction for people
• Address pain points for design system makers and consumers
• Do not stress about perfection

Applying this through the lens of “people,” there are a few areas we can look at to meet these principles. They include:

• Evaluate your team’s size
• Include the appropriate roles
• Express gratitude
• Work toward a centralized or hybrid governance model
• Focus on serving your design system consumers

So let’s look at how these areas can lead to your design system’s success and your team’s happiness!

Evaluate your team’s size

From our report, design system team size increases with company size. Design system teams don’t have to be dedicated teams. We learned that about half of companies with a design system team are only partially resourced.

People happy with their documentation come from organizations with either a dedicated design system team or a partially resourced one. Our report found that 73% of people without design system teams were either neutral or unhappy about their design system documentation. It seems not having a team is a source of unhappiness.

We recommend looking at the size of your company and seeing how your team aligns compared to our survey results. While every team, company, and product line differs, this information can be a good benchmark for how you might want to grow your team. If you’re curious about how and went to grow your team, check out our recent How We Document webinar.

Include the appropriate roles

Regarding who’s on your team, we learned that even the youngest design systems include roles beyond designers and developers. While designers and developers are foundational, groups often have at least one product manager and one content person. We recommend formally adding these roles to your team to ensure adequate resourcing. If that’s impossible, we suggest working toward this and considering adding them informally. For example, you might have a designer in a product management capacity. If they’re interested, it could be a good way for them to learn a new skill or develop leadership experience. In a recent webinar, Dan Mall mentioned design systems are like startups. While you might be able to get away with a few designers and engineers at first, you’ll eventually need additional roles if you want to scale appropriately.

Express gratitude

Our findings revealed that 40% of managers are happy with the design system’s documentation compared to 34% of individual contributors. When we asked ICs why they indicated unhappiness or neutralness (38%), most said that while they accomplished a lot, there was still a lot of work left to do. Working on design systems can be a tireless, unending effort. If you’re a manager or team lead, consider thanking your team members for their contributions. Gratitude goes a long way; design system makers can be tough on themselves. It’s easy to focus too much on striving for perfection for components or on all the other design system needs; contributors often lose sight of how much they accomplished.

Some easy ways to show gratitude include:

• Celebrate any wins along the way
• Thank and acknowledge the accomplishments of the team or teammates during large org-wide monthly/quarterly meetings
• Facilitate monthly/quarterly retros to reflect on the work the team accomplished
• When communicating design system updates, mention the contributors to acknowledge their accomplishments so others can celebrate them, too.
• If you’re not their direct manager, let their manager know of any accomplishments and success the employee contributed to

Work toward a centralized or hybrid governance model

Our report showed that people happy with their design documentation come from organizations with centralized or hybrid teams. Of respondents with federated teams, 76% expressed feeling neutral or unhappy, and that’s not a small number! Based on our experience working with customers, centralized and hybrid teams have the resources and accountability to ensure good documentation. If you have a federated team, consider working toward a hybrid model to move toward happiness. A first step might be identifying a small group (i.e., 1-2 individuals) that can focus on creating and maintaining documentation.

Focus on serving your design system consumers

When we think about design systems, we often think about creating components and patterns that serve the product’s customers. We often overlook that the most immediate users are the designers, engineers, and writers who design and create the product our customers use. (Taylor Cashdan mentions this in his article and many other great people-related points!)

As you evaluate your design system, consider how well it serves the people that consume it. Our survey showed respondents that their current design system provides workflow efficiency, consistency, and seamless collaboration. Additionally, their documentation is a source of truth and onboarding and instills confidence in their work.

There are several articles out there that acknowledge that employee satisfaction affects retention. And part of satisfaction includes having the correct tools and technology to work productively. If it’s been a while since you’ve checked in with your design system consumers or the design system is about to go through any change (e.g., rebranding, tool transition, etc.), we recommend conducting some survey or feedback session. Surveys can help get quantitative feedback on how satisfied people are with the design system and identify areas for improvement. As always, it’s essential to understand your users. If you can, engage any user researchers in your org, and if that’s not possible, we recommend Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research. It’s a great guide to doing some scrappy research to help inform your team!

Scrappy is temporary

We offered some suggestions around the people aspect of design systems to help create happiness and success. Some of what we recommend leans a little scrappy to make the most of what you have, but we want to mention that this should only be temporary. Sometimes teams have to run a little scrappy to make a case for more resources, but it shouldn’t be your team’s final or persistent state. With the focus on people, pay attention to their workload, and if it’s too much, consider scaling back and resetting expectations with everyone – the contributors, consumers, product managers, and stakeholders. It’s an excellent way to segue into a conversation about proper staffing. Learn more about evolving past the scrappy phase.

👋 Don’t forget–in the final part of our series, we’ll dive into the process aspect of running your design system and how you can ensure success and happiness with what you have.