What I Learned Implementing a Design System for an Existing Product

Lessons learned from a designer’s point of view

Background

About 2 years ago I was hired as a Product Designer at ThycoticCentrify. I joined a team of 4 and was excited to work at a company that put money towards design. However, it didn’t take long before I realized that’s all they were doing — throwing money at it. We had good designers, but everyone was working in isolation and patterns were “re-designed” constantly.

Realizing that my previous company was pumping out more features per month with 1 (great) designer, I knew we had to implement a design system. So I quickly became the de facto owner of the “design system”. I built out a considerable amount of components in Figma, and devs even started to codify these components. But there was no documentation, and I spent more time advocating for the design system than actually contributing to it.

Fast forward to this summer, I was hired at Trainual as their first Design Systems Designer. The fact that a company 1/5 the size of my previous had carved out a specific position for the design system meant A LOT.

At the same time, I knew this experience wasn’t going to be all rainbows and butterflies. Design systems are mysterious, unwieldy, ever-changing, and just straight-up difficult. That’s part of the reason why I love them.

Below I will share my learnings on the first 6 months of my journey.

My situation

Just to set the mood a little bit, here’s some useful context:

• I joined a team of 3 other IC designers. Since my start date, 2 other designers have joined the company👋
• 2 months into my journey the company hired my partner-in-crime — a Design Systems Developer (Dacey Nolan) 🙌
• Pre start date, Trainual already had a component library in Figma, some stories in Storybook, and a considerable amount of documentation in zeroheight. The fact that I did not have to advocate for these tools was…