SG Design System

Société Générale is an International Banking Group. Our company is the Corporate and Investment banking branch.

Design System Name

• SG Design System

Design System team size

• Our council has 4 members, it’s not a “team” though

Design System team make-up

• Designers
• Engineers
• Content designer
• We don’t have strongly defined job roles – some of our designers are more hybrid?

Governance model

• Hybrid
• Hybrid council structure

Governance approach

We wanted to address our organizational issues head on. Our Design team setup is transversal, and the way that we work on projects is decentralized. We also didn’t want any one team to have ownership over the design system (and we wanted to avoid treating it as a product as then it could be moved from our department or defunded). So we needed a group of people who could work on a system that had no specific ownership – settling on a council structure, with a focus on non-council contributors.

Governance’s challenges

One of the main challenges to solve through our design system was just being able to get things done. We’re a small working group and we manage requests from 100s of projects so it’s managing the prioritisation and actual day-to-day work that is our main challenge

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 solving the issue of not having full time people on a DS team. We manage to get work done and we manage to collaborate well with non-DS council designers and developers. We’ve also managed to protect the design system from being taken by another business line (internal acquisitions of successful projects is very common).

For the future, we’re about to migrate to a major new version of our system, and of course we’re back to communication again. This time we’re spreading the news via multiple channels, like through business owners and IT leads. With our new release note/news subscription we have a good number of subscribers who will now get that news directly.

Our governance helped with collaboration and collaboration since we’ve included people from different business lines and teams in our council. Just that alone has been amazing for collaboration between different parts of the business.

On the efficiency and consistency part, we have a small team and a huge roadmap (don’t we all?). Our contribution process really helps with defining work to be done and our prioritisation workshops let us be realistic about what we’re able to achieve.

One of the most significant positive impact our governance had is definitely work organisation. We’re able to get many more people on the team involved to help us push work forwards. We’ve also survived restructuring and budget cuts everywhere, which our council model protects us from. We’re also able to rotate members on and off the council, which has avoided some burnout etc!

It’s hard to give any specific data about our impact (we have significant security), but some major ones: 

1. In the 12 weeks prior to our new setup, we’d had a total of four new contribution requests. On the day of the launch, we had five new requests and by the end of the week it had doubled! As the team now know how to contribute — they are actively doing so. 
2. There’s been a 93% decrease in the confused questions that the team would ask about how to give bits of unstructured feedback to the system. For me, not having to answer all the messages and calls has been a huge boost to my sanity!

We’ve written and communicated a lot about our setup:

• Contributing to Our Design System: The (Happy) Tale of Creating a New Component
• Taming Chaos: Our Design System Governance at Scale