Your company needs a design system and now is the time to tell them - Part 1 of 2
We're in the end-game now.
I have been working at TeamApt for about 5 years now and it has been an experience I am forever grateful for. The work culture is amazing, the army of world-class engineers and the wonders they have to churn out every day, the product teams and their drive, the top management team and their openness & transparency—it’s the kind of can-do vibe that I love to see and be a part of.
But!
It took us almost 5 years to adopt a design system and it was a tooth & nail battle to get there.
There are a lot—and I mean, a lot— of books and articles on design systems, their merits, why should use them, how to scale them, and their best practices. What most of them conveniently gloss over is how to secure buy-in. These books and articles paint an ideal reality where design is respected, where products are anchored by research and the voice of the designer is heard, no matter his station in the organogram.
Seasoned veterans will tell you differently.
Unless a company is founded by a designer or a technical person who understands the value of design to product pipeline, design IS still treated as an afterthought, even in 2022. If you were to check behind the curtains of some “Design Driven“ companies (especially Indigenous companies), you are likely to find that design barely contributes to the product’s direction/trajectory. If it’s not about fancy interactions and “doing it like Cowrywise“, most of the time, design is pretty much ignored or outsourced to engineering or biz-dev, leaving designers out in the cold.
What I’m about to tell you, is a true story, and you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone or I’ll be in big trouble.
Promise?
Cool!
When I first joined TeamApt 5 years ago, the company was still navigating the murky start-up waters. We were still < 30 people at the time and because of the kind of work we were doing, we had to run Agile ProMax in order to meet up with deadlines on projects. There was another hire there who was an early-career designer at the time, and we both were tasked to cranking out a LOT of designs. That meant there wasn’t a lot of time for reviews and design systems — at the speed we were going, we only had one opportunity to get it right the first time. Design revisions were extremely costly, with PMs having to sign off on every design decision that was made. It was a mess and I knew that things needed to change.
Step 1: If you’re selling, you need to win your first buyer.
One of the key struggles I faced in my earlier days was getting someone from the engineering team to advocate on behalf of design. Everyone was focused on delivering what was on their Jira dashboards and remember, these were TA’s nascent years so a lot of the decision-makers didn’t have the luxury of sitting still long enough to listen about the benefits of a “Design System“
However, the odds were turned in my favor. Twice.
For you see, T. Eniolorunda (founder + CEO) loves good design. I mean, HE LOVES GOOD, AESTHETICALLY PLEASING, USER DELIGHTING DESIGN. It did take some convincing, some micromanaging, and a lot of debates on what good design should mean for the company but eventually, he started to trust my decisions on the design direction for our products. Little by little, a design-first culture took hold at the company and it began to show—by the time some of our products launched, the big wigs took notice.
The second odd in my favor came in the form of this uber-human called Adrian. You see, the general consensus about Adrian is that he is better than sliced bread. He codes, he has a fanatically fantastic eye for design, he’s a gamer, an anime dreadlord—he’s the nerd’s nerd, the nerd all nerds pray to ascend to. And when I was paired with him on a really cool project, we formed a partnership that’s still going strong to this day. There’s never been a project that we’ve both worked on that wasn’t a hit. Adrian understood the value of good design, not just aesthetically but at a deeper, experiential level, making sure that design and code are a 1:1 mapping. There are no half measures or cop-outs with him and, with his help, design’s foothold at the company was solidified even further.
Step 2: Demonstrate Value, Big picture style.
So you’ve secured your advocate(s) and things are moving a little smoothly but now, you’ve got to sell it to the rest of the team so they can adopt it. You could try holding a deep-dive (engineers get aroused when they hear deep-dives), gathering stakeholders into one room, and talking to them about the value of design systems…and maybe that would work.
Seasoned veterans will tell you differently.
What drives adoption is demonstratable value, especially at scale. If the engineering team can see that having a comprehensive design system means less reliance on you as a designer, quicker deployment times because they don’t have to recreate the business logic all the time, consistent product experience because all their UI is coming from a single source of truth, they’ll be more readily adopt design system principles into their own workflow. It doesn’t even stop with engineering, product and strategy teams can test new features and gain insights faster,
But do not expect to accomplish that in a flash— it is a labor of love that takes time. And with that time, you’ll have the chance to build relationships with these people. Get to know them, how they work, spend time with them. Discard the designer v developer squabbles and you’ll discover that they are like you, just trying to do good work. So you commit to working with them on projects. Attend a few of their meetings—don’t worry, they’re mostly a yawn fest but you’ll pick a thing or two—and work with them on some projects. That way, you can introduce them to some design principles and ideas. Not all at first but little by little, you can start to win their trust. May even smuggle the idea of a reusable UI library. It’s not a concept they aren’t familiar with, but coming from you, with your backlog of trust and goodwill, they’ll come to value it even more.
The outcome: Products that don’t look like Bootstrap blue or Tailwind teal. Products with a consistent experience. Products that are inclusive and thoughtfully built.
I’ll have to stop here this week because it’s a very long discussion and I’d want to share as much of my experience on this as possible.
Sidelines
A few days ago, I held a 1-day FREE workshop on how to design better dashboards with Figma. IT WAS LIT AF! You can catch up on how it went down here, and grab the Figma file here. But that’s not the real juice. Remember I promised you a 15% discount, just because you’re subbed to this substack? I’m here to deliver on that promise - Click here to get the discount
MTN’s rebrand campaign has finally launched and, well….it wasn’t that bad. They did some things right but I feel we haven’t seen the rest of it so I’ll hold off on my final verdict on the matter. For now.
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I wonder how much time went into crafting this lovely article! Thanks a lot Leslie
Nice, weldone. Really educative