Curious about my journey going through this process three times in just six years? Dive into the nitty-gritty details in the article I shared with the Better by Design community 👇

You might also get some value from this, if you're putting together your DS case👇

@itspatmorgan I can’t even imagine trying to tell that to any boss or executive I’ve ever worked for hah. Would be laughed out the door. But you’re right

@nintendobenzo The truth hurts sometimes haha

@itspatmorgan Agreed. It's a product in itself. Needs to go through the whole cycle, including extensive testing.

@charbrew 💯

@itspatmorgan For sure. It’s probably a matter of how many resources and people you have at your disposal, and that could reduce the timeline a bit. But it is in fact the strategic work that takes the most. Starting from ground up requires a lot of planning, and that planning will fall apart…

@AlexCristache Yep, building the ecosystem takes a long time

@itspatmorgan True, same exp :) Took us, team of 4, almost 2 ys to see it in prod across 4 products, 11 teams. In the end it's a dev tool and you're changing how folks work, not fun. The biggest pain point for adoption and updates was CSS, nobody outside of the dedicated team wanted to touch…

@razvantirboaca Nice chart! TBH I think you guys made good time considering the number of products and teams involved! Good job!

@itspatmorgan Yep. Part of the problem is design libraries in figma are not outputing code with matching styles / components for engineers. So it take a long time for design systems to be built.

@rafaelrdesign Perhaps. I've never worked on a product that would have been able to directly accept code from any previous design to code generation tool. Too much customization and in-house complexity.

@itspatmorgan What part do you reckon takes the longest? back and forth with devs and biz?

@andiogocastro For me, the expansion across a full platform takes the longest. Doing the initial design update and implementing it in one area tends to have a fairly clear scope. It's the expansion to all corners of the software that follows that can often be a fuzzy marathon.

@itspatmorgan Can confirm, took us some less month 🫡

@herr_dahl 🫡

@itspatmorgan Design systems are dynamic and tend to change over time. It also depends on the team and their needs. Start small and gradually build it over time. This way, it can evolve, and you can develop and maintain it as you work on your projects, features, etc.

@empirikal Yep, that's what I was trying to convey. Doing the initial design, landing it into the product, then gradually expanding to the whole platform

@itspatmorgan True! We shouldn’t be creating more of those… though The maintenance burden is huge for the little UX gains. I like the @shadcn approach of composable and renewable components that are automatically generated

@jvivas_official @shadcn Interesting. Do have a particular article or resource of theirs in mind to learn more?