Design systems' madness in 10 points

How design systems really work at 90% of sophisticated tech companies:

1. A core team of designers and a few developers work on creating standard components that are used across an application or ecosystem of applications.
   
   

2. Designers can design components faster than developers can write them, so there’s usually a backlog of components that have been designed but haven’t been developed.
   
   

3. Feature teams need components faster than they can be designed and productized into the design system, so they often design and build custom components.
   
   

4. Contributing back those custom components to the design system is often desired and rarely done. Although people want to contribute, the feature team priorities always come first, so it depends on the core team to standardize and integrate those components.
   
   

5. Figma component libraries are meant to give speed to designers and establish a shallow manifest of what’s currently available to build a given UI.
   
   

6. Developers couldn’t care less about your Figma layer names or file organization. They just want to understand what needs to be built, how it needs to behave, and the delta between what’s readily available as a component and what needs to be customized.
   
   

7. Developers will always let you know if something can’t be accomplished or isn’t optimal. You just listen, discuss and figure out a solution together.
   
   

8. There’s zero real connection between Figma components and existing UI component libraries built in React, Vue, Svelte, or whatever. The connection is only semantical. What exists in Figma should exist as an importable component to use in the frontend (ideally).
   
   

9. Design systems are generally perceived as a resource to increase collaboration speed and build consistent experiences. They help collaboration by capturing and standardizing the tactical details of design that otherwise would be too distracting and time-consuming to discuss.
   
   

10. Many companies have intelligent people trying to improve bottlenecks in design system workflows, but in practice, design systems are still far from being a product development holy grail.

I might be missing a lot of nuances here, but I wanted to share this because I have noticed people don't seem to understand how design systems work in the practical day-to-day.