“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Since I joined the tech industry, I can’t recall working for a company that didn’t go through major changes. Whether it was two companies merging, a major corporation acquiring my company, or our company acquiring another, change has been a constant. Consequently, shifts in company strategy have often followed organizational changes, inevitably impacting the product mission and leading my team(s) to interact with other teams involuntarily.
At a recent design leadership summit I attended, many design leaders shared similar experiences and challenges. In the dynamic tech industry, working effectively with other design teams with different cultures and work styles poses a significant question. Yes. We can apply change management concepts and shared meals. On the other hand, I believe true culture and community can be cultivated when teams realize they create success together and celebrate it.
When tasked with leading a new design system for Generac, I saw it not just as an assignment to create shareable color palettes or tokens, but as an opportunity to foster a design culture and community among multiple connected design teams.
Why the design system project? A company’s design system typically serves designers and engineers initially, shielded from immediate end customer exposure. This means that the team can have more control over the scope and timeline. This affords greater control over scope and timeline. Moreover, it serves as a natural onboarding process for multiple design teams to showcase their design languages and principles.
Preparation
Assign Leads: Before embarking on this journey, finding partners with the requisite design system skills and a diplomatic mindset was crucial. Essential hard skills included system thinking, design engineering, and operational skills. Additionally, leads needed to be customer-centric to bring the design system to life. Fortunately, I had two strong leads from the beginning.
Create a Team: Given that multiple design teams were assembled somewhat artificially for this mission, discussions ensued about project leadership. A top-down decision placed me as the dedicated leader, which I framed as a collective challenge. Instead of dictating terms to other teams, we organized a workshop to brainstorm our mission, ways of working, and initial goals collaboratively.
Remove Blockers: Collaboration depends on removing predictable obstacles. Therefore, ensuring all tools and resources were accessible without friction points was the key.. All teams migrated to the same Figma organization before starting work.
Research & Onboarding: With the core team, we conducted organizational research by creating stakeholder maps and identifying key stakeholders. We also collated local design systems, branding resources, and tech stacks, as well as the list of products to adopt the design system.
Getting to Work
Provide a Mission & Problem to Solve: While it’s possible to create a design system by referencing others, adoption issues often arise without real-use case grounding. Our strategy was to involve feature designers early on as contributors to ensure practical adoption. In real life, a design system’s biggest challenge isn’t about its creation. The most painful and time-consuming part is adoption (unless you are creating a new product). Our goal was to create a lean and scalable design system that would be implemented, and then scale up the design system to improve the end customer experience. We worked under the mission of “Create a design system that won’t sit on the shelf” from the beginning with a very customer-focused mindset.
Stimulate the Team Intellectually and Emotionally: Once the core team and leadership aligned, we invited other designers and engineers to join the journey. We organized a design system summit and brought four teams across North America together in our headquarters. Select industry experts provided the presentations and key members dived deeper into the hairy topics such as how to create a multi-brand design system. Of course, we had social gatherings after work hours. After some beers and laughs, the team was much more open to each other, too.
Gamify & Review
I also invited feature designers as contributors to the design system to train them as well as to prevent potential frictions for adoption. (Caution: I don’t recommend this approach to manage a much bigger design system, but this approach could work out at the MVP stage of a new design system.)
There are two challenges to tackle though. First, how can we expect feature or brand designers to spend time on a design system on top of their everyday work? Then, how can we ensure quality and consistency in their work?
Firstly, we gamify the contribution process. Every designer and engineers’ contribution was publicly celebrated. Our design system platform page ensures providing credit for every element’s creators, stress testers, and technical reviewers. Their ownership and success were visible in the newsletters and Slack channels too. At our first milestone celebration, the top 10 contributors received mascot legos as well as coffee coupons. Those are not big bonuses or extravagant meals, but they surprisingly motivate the key contributors.
Also, a rigorous review process was established to keep the quality and consistency of deliverables from multiple part-time contributors. Any new elements or revisions of the elements would go through reviews from the design system, use case, brand, as well as technical feasibility perspective. This way the team relied on what had been published without managing too many changes chaotically.
Our Achievements
In eight months, the four teams achieved the design milestones of Design System Version 1, encompassing foundational components, tokens, and multi-branded style guides. Within a year, Design System V1 was integrated into the top-priority mobile app product, thanks to close design and engineering collaboration.
Furthermore, five design teams now collaborate seamlessly through clear pipelines and channels. All federated engineering teams have begun adopting the design system, actively participating in discussions regarding what’s next.
I have to admit, I learned so much from this experience. I had many other responsibilities, so I refrained from getting into the weeds once the vision and strategy was clear. The result was astonishing – with guidance, the core team matured into leaders and showcased their achievements at the company level.
The design system community has demonstrated improved collaboration, resulting in heightened productivity and the resolution of conflicts. Testimonials from feature teams emphasize the significant impact of the design system on development efforts. Rather than waiting for direction, the community proactively formulated their next steps using a self-serve collaboration process and a portal to gather team feedback.
In the end, we not only shipped the design system but also fostered an empowered and motivated design and engineering community.
Julie Lee's Projects 