Design systems management from bottom-up

Exploring the soft side of design systems

The field of design systems is evolving at an incredible pace. By the time you, as an in-house designer, manage to convince all stakeholders of its necessity, build and adopt it, it might become outdated.

You didn’t implement tokens, they’ll say, or that BEM is no longer best approach, or the JavaScript framework you selected is out of fashion.

However, all aforementioned examples are technical — a hard side of a design system. What about a soft side, like advocacy, adoption, governance, does it change as fast or its methods and principles are less affected by time?

I would like to think the latter. After all, the way organisations operate doesn’t change as rapidly. True, over the last two decades, we have witnessed a steady transition from waterfall to agile methodologies, as well as the increasing prevalence and maturation of in-house product design teams and the design profession itself. However, these changes appear to be less rapid compared to technological advancements.

Image 1: Socio-technical collaboration. Illustration by Elena Kiannu

In this article, we will cover some of those soft aspects of design systems that I have gathered during my five years of building one of them as a bottom-up initiative:

• Design system as a part of your organisation.
• Exploring design systems through the Soft Systems Methodology lens.
• Adopting Scrum for a design system team.

It is important to mention that different organisations have different needs and ways of work, due to their size, industry and design maturity, thus there is no universal approach for a “soft” side either. My experience comes from a 1000+ employees organisation that creates B2B web products and has a relatively decent design maturity, though still challenged by many technical and design legacies.

Design system as a part of your organisation

When beginning a design system as a bottom-up initiative, it is essential to set a low adoption threshold. One effective approach is to integrate it into organisational processes right…