Aligning on a Design System
How might we align as the design leadership team to have a unified design system for a unified product?
Situation
The official company's design system had not been meeting the designers and product needs, so the team was working on making adjustments to suit our needs.
Engineering teams had independently recreated versions of components, leading to inconsistency, code duplication and tech debt in maintaining multiple iterations, which had become increasingly challenging due to widening disparities hindering development velocity.
Design leadership was having difficulty making decisions due to issues in communication and opposing views among team members.
Task: Mediate among members of the design leadership team and find a clear path to push the initiative forward.
Actions
01
Understanding the Problem and Creating a Strategy
Started by understanding the problem and goals by interviewing our design director and the designer in charge of the design system. Once I understood the dynamics, I created a plan for facilitating the communication among team members and lead them towards making decisions.
02
Aligning on Small Decisions
I helped the team identify issues and decide whether those were blockers or they could be revisited later. This allowed the team to make some decisions to move forward with.
03
Considering Use-Cases
Organized the team to audit the product and come up with use cases for a controversial pattern
04
Prioritizing Work
Facilitated prioritization exercises for component and pattern changes that needed to be addressed
Results
“Kudos to Natalia for being a great facilitator in the patterns workshop”
“Thank you for driving Fleet patterns and keeping us organized.
We all know how hard this task is.”