Design Systems are a must-have for organizations that need to be agile, fast, and customer-focused. So what do Product Managers or Product Owners need to look out for to support their teams towards Design Systems adoption?
It has been well established that Design Systems are a must-have for organizations that need to be agile, fast, and customer-focused. However, when it comes to Design Systems adoption or even definition, the spectrum is quite wide. What do Product Managers or Product Owners need to look out for to support their teams towards Design Systems adoption?
A Design System provides a library of artifacts guided by clear standards, that are documented and shared by an individual, team, or organization as code and design tools so that building and maintaining products can be more efficient and cohesive.
A Design System’s success will depend on the implementation, collaboration, and adoption within the organization. Drawing from some of the recommendations from Alla Kholmatova’s book “Design Systems”, we define six constituent parts for a Design System.
Depending on the maturity level of the Design System used in an organization it could have one or more of these six parts.
The principles that guide how the rest of the Design System need to be built.
These are the principles that help the team - both designers and the developers - in making choices. These principles are often influenced by the brand voice and the mission of the organization.
Design patterns that influence how a product is being perceived.
The style guides that have been in existence way before Design Systems became recognized as a concept is a great example.
Design patterns for building the product functionality.
Several techniques exist to organize these patterns. The Atomic Design by Brad Frost is a well recognized hierarchical structure for organizing these functional design patterns.
Front-end components (without business logic) that can be reused within a product, and across products.
The concept of front-end components always existed amongst the development teams. With the recent introduction of cloud platforms (bit and Storybook are good examples) to maintain these components, making these accessible to a larger audience - including the designers - has become much more easier.
Collaboration processes - automated, manual, or semi-manual - that are well defined.
It goes without saying that if there are automated processes available the collaboration will occur seamlessly. The integrations between designers’ tools & developers’ tools (Live Components that connect Invision DSM and Storybook is a good example), and the usage of design tokens help with automation.
Documented policies that are essential to maintain a Design System
These could be policies covering what gets accepted as part of a Design System, who is eligible to contribute to a Design System, and how to audit a Design System.
As a Product Manager or Product Owner, you need to have a clear understanding of these constituents, their interplay, the gaps, and how the Product Design and Development teams will follow a Design System. It is also possible that the organization is banking on your Product Design and Development teams to lay the foundations for a Design System that will later get adopted by other teams. In this case, you have a responsibility to ensure that the product roadmap facilitates building the Design System.
Want to learn more about Design System preparation and implementation? Reach out the team at Object Edge.
