Design System Strategy – How to create one
Michelle Chin
Your design system is ready for a design system strategy!
You’ve led a scrappy team of designers and developers for months to create a solid design system. It has a design library, coded-component libraries, and some documentation; people work more efficiently. You and the team are feeling accomplished – awesome! The design system has even caught the attention of stakeholders! And they come to you saying they’d like to scale the design system. However, they want you to develop a strategy for it.
While cool and exciting, it might make you a little nervous. You might think, “But I’m not a PM. I didn’t go to business school. Strategy? I was just trying to make designers’ and developers’ jobs easier.”
If you’re in this situation, this article will help you figure out how to craft a strategy for your design system. While similar to other design/product strategies, it’s also slightly different. We’ll highlight how it’s different, what you need to consider, and some pro tips for success.
Strategy Basics
Before diving into a design system strategy, let’s see where it lives in the grand scheme of things.
At the broadest level is the company’s business strategy. A business strategy is a set of well-thought initiatives that the company pursues to provide value for the company and its stakeholders. Depending on the company, the business strategy usually sets the company’s course for the next one to three years.
Laddering up to the overall business strategy are usually strategies set by business units, functional orgs, etc. A design org would have a design strategy that aligns and contributes to the broader business strategy. A design strategy includes a set of crucial initiatives that the design org pursues to provide value for the company and the people who use the company’s products. Depending on the org, the strategy could set the organization’s direction for the next year or more.
Laddering up to the design strategy (and possibly engineering strategy) is typically the design system strategy. Its initiatives align with the design strategy (and maybe the engineering strategy) and aim to provide value to the company, design/engineering organizations, and product users. Depending on where the design system is, the strategy might set the course for the next year or two.
A design system strategy is one of many strategies that is part of the broader, overall business strategy. So, as you think about your design system strategy, you are really not starting from scratch. You’re framing the design system work in terms of how it feeds into the success of the design org and then how that success feeds into the business strategy.
Identifying a design system strategy
When it comes to creating a design system strategy, you are looking at two things:
- The current state of the design system and its team (including a lack of or an under-resourced team)
- The initiatives and goals of the design business strategies
From there, you’re evaluating:
- Given the current state of the design system and its team, how can it contribute to the design org’s or company’s strategies?
- Is there a gap? Is that gap something the team and the design, engineering, etc., organizations can work toward closing?
- What can the design system in its current or near-future state contribute to the initiatives and goals of the design or business strategies?
- Where can you partner with other teams and their strategies?
Depending on your answers, you can start thinking about potential solutions or goals to achieve. You might already know the following steps, which is excellent. Even if you’re sure, we recommend digging into what other design systems and their teams of similar structures are doing or have done. This can inspire where your design system and team can go. This doesn’t mean only looking at Material Design or Carbon to see what they have in their design system documentation. You can do some of that; however, it can’t be your only source of ideas. Unless documentation sites share how design system teams organize themselves and their products, their organizational and company strategies, or how they’ve come to make those decisions, you are making many assumptions. Whatever they’ve decided might have nothing in common with your org and company’s strategies.
Instead, we encourage you to chat with other design system makers and get their takes on things. Consider attending meetups and webinars or joining Slack communities, like zheroes, to find information.
As you identify solutions, vet them against the design and business strategies. Do they help contribute to the design or business strategy? Do they align with them? Everything in your design system strategy should align with or contribute to those higher-level strategies. This means your work is happening in harmony with everyone else’s work.
Even though you might be the design system lead, it doesn’t mean you must create the strategy independently. If you’re new to this, we highly recommend working with someone in design or engineering management who’s more seasoned or familiar with how other teams or the company approach creating strategies. It’s easier to have stakeholders understand your strategy if it’s organized or leverages a mental model they are familiar with.
Special considerations
Initially, we mentioned how design system strategies differ from design and product strategies. There are two things to consider as you craft your strategy.
Typically, design and product strategies consider how they will provide value to the product’s end users. Design system strategies should consider that, too, but design systems also have an additional set of users – the product teams that consume the design system. When creating your strategy, think about the operational initiatives you might need to include in your strategy.
Depending on your organization, there might be multiple design systems and several products they support. Design system strategies need to consider how they contribute to, affect, or are affected by numerous product strategies. This isn’t to say that a design system strategy should have a 1:1 match for every product strategy initiative. Instead, be aware of what other products aim to do, how you may or may not be able to support it, or how this might impact your strategy. For example, your strategy might include ensuring all product teams start using the design system. However, you learn that a few products will focus on APIs and not anything involving the product’s front end. So, your strategy might need to look different or follow an extended timeframe.
Sometimes, you can surface themes from other product strategies to create an overarching initiative in your strategy. For example, a few products are modernizing their code base, and it is an excellent time for the design system team to partner and support this effort.
These are just a few examples; what levers you push and pull will depend on your company, product organizations, and design system team scenarios.
Some design system strategy ideas to get you started
There are several aspects you can consider for your strategy. Here are a few ideas to jump-start your brainstorming. These are just ideas, so not all of these may apply to your company, product, or design system. If several apply, consider the ones that resonate most with your situation.
Design system maturity
Where on the path of maturity does your design system fit? InVision created a Guide to Benchmarking Your Design System, which offers different levels of maturity modeled after Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. You can also get a sense of design system maturity from one of our previous webinars.
Scaling
Most often, design system strategies are needed when the design system is at a point where it needs to scale across. What does scaling mean? Does it mean:
- Across the entire product portfolio?
- Including multiple themes? (e.g., light mode, dark mode, colorways, etc.)
- Including multiple brands?
- Spanning a variety of devices and codebases?
- Quickly applying the design system to future acquisitions?
- Formalizing or establishing a governance model?
Team operations
Is there a need or opportunity to bring:
- Efficiency to feature work
- Consistency with process
- Modernization with codebases
- Efficiency for R&D and innovation
Brand alignment
Are there opportunities or initiatives around aligning the products more closely with brand or brand updates? Is there a need for increased consistency across the product portfolio to help with brand identity and trust? Is a brand refresh on the horizon?
“How We Document” – more ideas and supporting data
We have even more ideas and supporting data for your strategy in our annual How We Document report. This report reflects on several aspects of the design system field, from individual experience, team make-up, process, documentation, and more. You can get a copy of the report for free.
Getting feedback on your design system strategy
Getting feedback from different groups is essential as you work on your strategy. This ensures you’re considering multiple aspects and are less likely to miss something.
Leadership feedback
Typically, your design (and possibly engineering) leaders will want to review your drafts and work with you on revisions. This gives them insight into your thinking, how it aligns with other strategies in progress, and how they might support your initiatives. If this isn’t part of the org’s process, take the initiative to check in with your leadership team to get this feedback. This is crucial in ensuring transparency (no one likes surprises) and getting any needed support.
Lateral feedback
Consider getting feedback from other managers or leads that you closely work with. Because you work closely with them, they have good insight into how you work and your thinking and can provide feedback from that context. They might have input based on the product strategies they’re working on. Better yet, they might have questions from perspectives you hadn’t considered before. Iterating to include that clarity can lead to a more robust strategy.
We offer one caveat – be selective about whom you get feedback from. Your options for lateral feedback could include dozens of people! And you certainly don’t have time for all those meetings. Additionally, this can set the perception that the design system effort is democratically governed. Usually, this isn’t a good way to run a product. (Does anyone remember the stop sign design video?)
Instead, think about checking in with managers and leaders who are or could be most affected by your design system or peer mentors. While this might be your first design system strategy, you and your team are the most experienced and can make the most educated decisions.
Team feedback
Speaking of teams, getting feedback from your team members is also a great idea. While they might not be as senior or experienced as you, they may have good perspectives, opinions, or concerns.
Even if they don’t have feedback, it’s beneficial to share what you’re thinking so they can get a sense of the next steps with the design system. This way, they can see how their tactical work leads to a broader design system, design org, and company-wide impact. Sometimes, your final strategy will look completely different than what you might initially share with them. That’s also an excellent opportunity to share how and why it evolved. It provides them with insight into how those shifts affect their tactical work and builds a level of transparency and trust with the team. Lastly, it helps them level up their skills, so if they take on more leadership roles, they’ll know how creating strategies works. (You can also share this article. 😉 )
Documenting and presenting your strategy
As a design system documentation tool, you might think we’ll say, “Don’t forget to document your strategy in zeroheight.” Spoiler alert: We don’t recommend it, at least not in the early stages. As you’re working on your strategy and getting closer to presenting it, we recommend using whatever tool or template all the other organizations or business units use. Typically, there’s a PowerPoint template that others are using. Try to leverage that template as much as possible. That’s what your stakeholders are used to reading, and that familiarity can help them focus on the strategy instead of trying to make sense of what’s happening in this new presentation format you’re showing.
If the template isn’t meeting your needs, try to use it as much as possible so it follows some familiarity and veer from it when you need some other way of illustrating your point.
It’s not essential to post your strategy on your documentation site unless that’s where you also keep notes, etc. Even a link to the deck is fine – as long as people who need to reference it can access it.
However, once the strategy is finalized, we also recommend presenting it as part of any road show to help give more visibility to the goals and reasons behind the work being done around design systems. As other product teams or orgs share their strategies, it might be beneficial to share how the design system strategy aligns and contributes to those strategies. This can help build momentum around design system adoption!
Give creating a design system strategy a go!
This mini-business lesson might not give you an MBA, but hopefully, you’re feeling more prepared to create a design system strategy. While it might seem intimidating or overwhelming at first, keep these things in mind, and things should be more manageable:
- You’re not starting from scratch; follow the design/engineering org and company strategies as a starting point. Follow any organizational cultural practices, including templates!
- You know the current state of the design system and team the best, so you’ll know how well an idea will work.
- Check to see what other design system leaders and teams are doing with their design systems for inspiration and leverage some of the ideas we mention.
- Get feedback from leadership, peers, and the team – you’re not alone!
Let us know if you have any questions or used this article to help create your design system strategy! We’d love to hear from you, get some feedback, and find out how else we can help design teams do their best work! Reach out to us on Twitter/X @zeroheight or via our Slack community, zheroes.