Guide #011: How to encourage your organization to build and adopt a design system

Treat your design system like an internal product and identify a product owner. On a small team, the product owner and designer may be the same person. In the role of product owner, this person will act as the main point of contact as well as the primary evangelizer.

Lay the foundation for effective communication of your design system by outlining why it should exist. Leverage the organization’s culture and specific context to give concrete examples of how the design system will achieve a more consistent user experience or a more efficient build process. This will be your key selling points for evangelizing the design system. Also, align on the terminologies that will be used, like what constitutes a “card,” for example.

To aid in evangelizing and adoption, give your design system a fun and memorable name that is on brand with your organization. A few examples include Bolt by Pegasystems, Carbon by IBM and Polaris by Shopify. In addition, provide users with an easy-to-remember URL for internal or external accessibility. Recognize that the design system is a living product that will constantly evolve with input from partners/stakeholders including product and brand teams throughout your organization.

Begin the process by identifying which components should be added to your design system through auditing the elements within your digital interfaces. Assign a “Keep,” “Change” or “Trash” tag to each. Group all like elements within Keep and Change and create a priority list for which elements you'd like to address first, second, third, etc.