Gestalt

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Design System Name

• Gestalt

Design System team size

• More than 10

Design System team make-up

• Designers
• Engineers
• Product Owner/Manager
• Design Technologist

Governance model

• Hybrid

Means to ease collaboration

We have many successful collaboration assets in our team. 

1. We created a Team Support section in our documentation to display all the different ways our design systems users can contribute or get support. 
2. We hold Office Hours twice a week, totaling four different slots to provide product designers across different time zones with feedback on their usage of design systems and visual language. 
3. We manage two different Slack channels—one for designers and one for engineers—focused on answering questions, unblocking teams as fast as we can and guaranteeing they use our system appropriately. 
4. Gestalt also offers specific training for designers and cross-functional partners to advance their knowledge of the design system, accessibility training to encourage inclusive product development, and hands-on training to improve Figma tooling skill sets related to design system usage. 
5. Lastly, we partner with engineers from web and mobile teams to quickly and more efficiently develop native components.

We explored many ways to improve collaboration through the design system. 

A great example is the model of collaboration between Brand and Gestalt. We joined forces to redefine the Pinterest color palette, how we bring brand moments to product surfaces and how we impact each other’s jobs. This initiative, launched by Gestalt, played an essential role in developing our design tokens, illustrations and design principles. Additionally, this collaboration unified standards and instituted one source of truth. We also include Brand in our design system office hours, so designers and engineers can ask for brand support when necessary. This collaborative effort not only benefited the design system and the product teams’ relationships, but also created a bridge between brand and product that extends to other areas within the organization.

The use of Jira across the Design organization is a good example of how the team adapts to a change and uses that to benefit collaboration. We used Jira as our internal product management tool at Gestalt even when it wasn’t a mandatory tool across product teams. When the use of Jira became a requirement, we saw an opportunity to improve our collaboration model and we created a component request framework leveraging Jira to help us track requests and updates.

Collaboration results

We have numerous testimonials from designers and engineers that speak to the success, appreciation and value of Gestalt. Our designer on the complex business user patterns and components ‌received kudos through our internal rewards program from that team’s Director on the collaboration. Adoption rates have increased, and one case, we provided a component that helped improve ad revenue.

We have detailed customer sentiment metrics in our Quarterly and Yearly round-ups.

We regularly collaborate with product teams to develop and ship components that directly support certain initiatives. A few examples of that include when we partnered with analytics teams to develop data visualization guidelines, components and patterns. Throughout the process, we received feedback and support from product teams, and we worked together in collaborative work sessions. We also partnered with different teams to create Modules — unified, flexible and scalable containers to allow for fluid experimentation and increase design and engineering efficiency/velocity across teams. We also defined usage guidelines and best practices for teams leveraging and expanding the component.

Collaboration impact

We knew our collaboration had a significant impact when we noticed that this close connection with the Brand team was working. It was when they personally reached out to inform us accessibility in their color palette was now a prioritized part of their process, and that came from our syncs and conversations.

We established a model of collaboration that enabled bi-weekly syncs, collaborative Slack channels and shared docs. The goal is to create an open space to present our work, run design critiques and develop guidelines to elevate the Pinterest expression in our products. It improved the lives of designers and cross-functional partners by making the brand part of our design system documentation. 

By collaborating with teams, we guarantee that what we are shipping serves the right product teams, increases our adoption numbers and gives us the opportunity to increase quality all around the product by replacing custom components for components that are a part of the design system. And, when product areas are using Gestalt components, the time for development is significantly reduced.

From these collaborations, one of the biggest positive impacts our team had on the company was to support initiatives that increased ad revenues, directly supporting the company’s growth goals. Another key benefit was ‌cross-team knowledge sharing and the breaking down of silos between teams. We’re able to show teams how design systems work, how we think globally instead of locally and how we organize our work. We can also get a closer look into the ins and outs of products, and other teams can closely collaborate with documentation. In the end, we’re building stronger components and patterns by collaborating with product teams.