Evo Design System

Eptura is a global worktech company that provides software solutions for people, workplaces, and assets to enable everyone to reach their full potential. With 16.3 million users across 115 countries, we are trusted by more than 16,000 of the world’s leading companies, including 40% of Fortune 500 brands, to realize a better future at work.

Design System Name

• Evo Design System

Design System team size

• More than 10

Design System team make-up

• Designers
• Engineers
• Product Owner/Manager
• Content designer

Governance model

• Centralized
• Federated

Governance approach

The adoption of a centralized governance model for the Evo design system for web was primarily influenced by the availability of dedicated funding for that specific squad. Some of the benefits are that everyone knows whom to approach with questions, feedback, or requests related to the design system. Any updates or changes go through a defined process, ensuring that the system’s core principles remain intact. By avoiding redundant efforts and ensuring design consistency, our organization reduces rework and design-related inconsistencies that might be expensive to correct later. This governance model provides clarity, and promotes integrity, scalability, expertise, and cost-savings in our design system and it’s operations. In contrast, the Evo design system for mobile lacked secured funding. To address this, a federated approach was adopted, bolstered by the active involvement of two dedicated product teams. These teams allocated partial time and resources towards building the mobile component library. This strategy allowed the organization to effectively manage available resources while ensuring that the web design system received adequate support and development through centralized governance. Meanwhile, the collaborative efforts of the dedicated product teams facilitated progress in developing the mobile component library, even in the absence of direct funding.

Governance’s challenges

Evo’s primary challenge in governance has shifted over time but currently centers on scalability. As the design system and its adoption expand, our design system team has not grown adequately due to funding constraints. This, in turn, has resulted in minor process adjustments and heightened interaction frequency with internal colleagues. The aim is to handle this growth without imposing substantial additional workload on our design system team.

To effectively address the scalability challenge, we consistently refine our processes and ceremonies to convey Evo insights and guidelines to a broader audience. Our global company’s dispersion across timezones makes unified meetings impractical for universal attendance. Therefore, to garner more attention for content, we arrange internal webinars, workshops, Q&A sessions, and design system demos. Alongside these, we issue monthly newsletters, published on our Evo confluence page and widely shared internally through emails and chat applications. Apart from these interactions, specific chat channels are exclusively designated for feedback collection, bug resolution, and support provision. Active participation in these channels is encouraged among all team members. These avenues enable us to adeptly manage and prioritize our backlog without significant additional exertion from our team.

We have a clear system for defining new work and also requests. We’ve set up single feedback sources and worked hard on communicating roadmaps and release notes. Each member of our council tries to communicate as much as possible with the departments that they are in/have access to, so we can collect feedback and spread knowledge of updates etc.

One of the challenges we successfully accomplished is our collection of legacy products in the company. These products operate on distinct code bases from our design system. We addressed this by individually addressing the UI of each legacy product. We introduced overarching styles that align with our system, encompassing colors, typography, and iconography. Importantly, this was done without imposing a substantial burden on the teams responsible for those legacy systems. Consequently, the outcome is a suite of products that maintain their functional integrity while more closely adhering to our design system’s aesthetic.

For the future, in the context of both centralized web governance and federated mobile governance, the imminent major challenge revolves around scalability. Given financial constraints, it’s understood that our team won’t be able to expand in tandem with the increasing number of squads embracing our system. To address this, we are working on documenting beneficial touchpoints, processes, and guidelines in a central repository. Concurrently, we are providing training and empowerment to key adopters. This is intended to curtail the time demands on our design system squad for addressing inquiries, thereby facilitating uninterrupted focus on creation and management.

Our governance helped with collaboration and collaboration with Evo’s centralized web governance model, particularly their Scrum approach. This approach has aided not only the internal design team in collaborative and continuous value delivery, but also empowered the design system team to set clear output timelines comprehensible to product managers. In the case of Evo’s federated mobile governance model, it has facilitated enhanced collaboration and communication among squads. This is not solely due to the necessity of squad-level conventions, but also the need to maintain effective cross-squad collaboration while avoiding redundant efforts.

On the efficiency and consistency part, Evo’s centralized web governance model proved highly successful for our team, aligned with our company’s agile environment. As project managers and developers familiarized themselves with the design system, the assurance of constructing a defined count of components each sprint within the Scrum framework aided comprehension of anticipated timelines. It also clarified the timeframe within a sprint that the design team should be informed about any requirements.

The most pronounced favorable influence of our Evo web centralized governance model lay in the team’s capacity to steadfastly construct and release value according to a predetermined rhythm. This not only fostered confidence throughout the organization but also solidified the design system team’s reputation as a dependable unit that consistently furnished observable and traceable value.