Design System Maturity Model
Where is your design system, really?
Most maturity models hand you a single score on a single line. This one charts your system across six independent axes, so you can see you might be Stage 4 on components and Stage 1 on the thing that’s about to matter most.
~8 minutes · 29 questions · shareable results
The six axes
Tokens, components, and the reliability of the substrate consumers build on.
How much of the system’s knowledge lives outside people’s heads, in a form others can find and use.
The people, funding, and processes that keep the system alive as the org scales and changes.
How much of the org’s product work flows through the system, and whether using it is the path of least resistance or a tax.
Whether you can answer “is this system worth it?” and to whom.
Whether your design system is the default context that AI tools build from, or whether AI is silently working around it.
Four stages, per axis
V1
Growing
Teenage
Healthy Product
Built on the four-stage design system maturity model by Sparkbox, extended into six independent axes.