Top Design System Leaders Reveal - How To Build A Winning Design System Team-2

Top design system
leaders reveal: How to

build a winning design
system team
How to build a winning design system team 2
We would like to thank all the

interviewees for their valuable
contributions and insights for this
e-book. Their participation was vital

to its success, and we are grateful for
their time and willingness to share
their knowledge and expertise. Their
perspectives greatly enriched the
content of this book. Thank you.
Davy Fung
Product Design Lead - Design systems
www.meta.com
Ryan Taylor
Senior Manager, Design Systems &
Frontend Platform
www.snyk.io
Lise LaTorre
Head of Design systems
www.gusto.com
Karolina Boremalm
Global Head of Design Operations
www.ikea.com
Jack McCloy
Engineering Manager, Frontend
Infrastructure & Design Systems
www.amplitude.com
Gusto is a comprehensive payroll, benefits, and HR platform for

small businesses. It simplifies the process of managing employee
information, taxes, and compliance. Gusto offers a user-friendly
interface and integrates with a variety of other business tools.
2,400 employees
Meta is a social media and technology company founded by

Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. It operates the Facebook platform,
which enables users to connect, share, discover, and
communicate with each other online. The platform includes the
flagship website, as well as a suite of apps, such as Instagram
and WhatsApp.
85,000 employees
Driven by the IKEA vision to create a better everyday life for the
many people, Ingka Group brings the IKEA brand to millions of
homes. With its ready-to-assemble furniture, IKEA Retail is
known for its innovative designs, affordable prices and its focus
on sustainability.
230,000 employees
Snyk provides a software development platform to help

developers find and fix known vulnerabilities in open-source
dependencies. It was founded in 2015 and allows developers to
secure their code without slowing down the development
process. It offers features such as monitoring, alerting,
automated remediation and reporting.
1,300 employees
Amplitude provides a product analytics platform that enables

businesses to track, analyze and optimize their product usage
data to gain insights into how customers use their products and
how to improve their product strategy. It offers features such as
segmentation, funnels, and cohorts to help businesses
understand user behavior and make data-driven decisions.
500 employees
How to build a winning Design System team 4
Table of contents
C H A P T E R 1
Buy-in
Convincing decision makers that a DS/DS team is
needed
C H A P T E R 2
Team structure
Roles and structures of the best teams
C H A P T E R 3
Adoption
Getting teams/company to adopt and utilize the DS
C H A P T E R 4
Governance
How teams handle change management and adding
components at the enterprise level
Introduction Let’s learn from industry leaders,
through real-world examples how
to create a design system team
that delivers results.
Whether you're starting from
scratch or looking to improve an
existing team, this book is an
essential resource for anyone
looking to build a winning design
system team.
Written by Anima 
© 2023
C H A P T E R 1
Buy-in
“
This type of work is inherently incremental
and it requires patience and belief in the
value of the design system from leadership.
Jack McCloy @ Amplitude

How to build a winning design system team / Buy-In 7
How to get leadership

buy-in for a design
system
Starting small
One effective method of gaining

“
It was one of those things where it
buy-in for a design system is to was a side project, someone loved
start with a small project within it, those folks got to be dedicated to
the company. Lise, who worked at it, and it scaled very quickly.
Salesforce at the time, shared that
Lise LaTorre @ Gusto
a triad of one designer and two
engineers built a design system for
a specific project. As the team was
getting ready to launch it caught
the attention of the CEO, Mark
“
Design systems are the easiest sell
in the world. Do more, quicker, for
Benioff, who immediately less, and consistently. It makes
recognized the value and decided complete sense. But people are still
to roll it out across the entire getting their heads around what
enterprise.
they are.
Ryan Taylor @ Snyk

“
An estimated $1.5M in
annual savings or 21.25%
time saved for a typical
product development
annual budget for teams
that have a design system
TechMagic,
an AWS Consulting Partner.

Attracting talent Scalability
Having a design system indicate to By using a new Design System,

designers and engineers that the Ryan and his co-workers were able
organization values efficiency and to resolve a frontend scalability
design. It also shows that the issue. Using Snyk’s Design System
company is using the industry best and infrastructure became “the
solution” for addressing frontend
practices. It will attract and retain
scale and performance issues.
talented professionals.
“
Having a design system is how
“
Interest in our Design System
good product engineers and sparked when a customer tried to
designers expect to work.

import around 10,000 projects on
If you hire a great designer, and on l

our cybersecurity p atform. At the
their first day you say, awesome time our UI dashboard couldn’t
here’s your dell laptop... you’re handle that amount of data and
signaling something very specific l

wou d crash.
about how your company values

l
design. Ryan Tay or @ Snyk

“
I also made sure that leadership
saw the impact of the design
system work and that the value of
design systems was clear to them.
The decision to grow the design
system team from a team of one to
a team of multiple members was
made naturally. Enthusiasm for the
design system work remained
strong because leadership
understood the impact and purpose.

“
Postponing your design system. By 2025, over half of all new
Similar to deferring mortgage digital products globally will
payments. It may save you money be traceable to a platform-
in the short term, but it will cost based or open-source design
more in the long term. system
Ryan Taylor @ Snyk Build products faster with

Design Systems, Mar 2, 2021
Planting seeds Planning for scale
Having a component library in Design systems may not be

place can be a powerful way to deemed necessary for small teams,
convince top management of the as the extensive automation,
importance and benefits of processes and everything may not
implementing a design system. The be needed. However, starting with
presence of these processes and good foundations from day one,
infrastructure demonstrate the can be very beneficial in the future.
organization's commitment to You don't have to start from a full-

design and efficiency, making it blown design system, but even
easier to scale and maintain the setting an organized component
design system in the long-term.
library, that includes only a few

components and proper tokens for
Industry best practices & HR
color and typography, can save you

a lot of time in the future.
Having a design system indicate to
designers and engineers that the
organization values efficiency and
design. It also shows that the
company is using the industry best
C H A P T E R 2
Structure
“
The first year was to develop the system—
the core. The second year was to develop
the team, hire the right people. This third
year, we have been focusing on trying to
understand how to create adoption.
Karolina Boremalm
@ IKEA Retail, Ingka Group

How to build a winning design system team / Structure 13
How are the best

design system teams
structured
Like rice and water - 1 developer Both teams are flexible and work
for 1 designer closely together.
 
The scaling formula. At IKEA, Meta

At Amplitude, there is one designer
and Gusto, the design system
and 3 engineers, including Jack.
teams are composed of the same

amount of designers and
developers (with one lead / So what’s the best
manager on each side).   Designer : Developer ratio?
At Meta, the team also includes a

design program manager who is 1:1
responsible for connecting the dots
between the design system team,
design program manager and 1:3
product design or engineering
partners.
1:5
At Snyk, the team is composed of 5

developers, and managed by a
designer. There is a design system
squad and an infrastructure squad.
Both teams are flexible and work
closely together.
At Amplitude, there is one designer

How to build a winning design system team / Structure 14
“
It helps to have good
design sensibilities to work
on a DS. If you can't tell
the difference between 10
pixels and 12 pixels, you're
gonna struggle.
Ryan Taylor @ Snyk
C H A P T E R 3
Adoption
“
The adoption process began with individual
feature teams and the team offered more
support and set an example for other teams
to follow.
Davy Fung @ Meta

How to build a winning design system team / Driving adoption 16
Getting adoption for a

Design System
Top-level decision
In some organization there is a

“
It is simply mandatory.
top-level decision to use only Any new products have to be

components from the design developed with the design system.
system. The benefits of using a
Karolina Boremalm
DS are so clear that the top-level

management decides it’s not
optional and gives a mandate to
adopt the system.
“
If you're not using the Design
Incremental adoption System, you're going against the
paved path to success. There
Another approach is to focus on
has to be good justification for
the new system components and
that.
on phasing out of older ones.
Making it a technical requirement
Ryan Taylor @ Snyk
guarantee that all new UI
elements must be part of the
design system. The use of
elements that are not part of the
system is discouraged.
“
Product teams were given
a mandate to adopt the
design system or risk
losing discoverability in the
top-level menu.
Davy Fung @ Meta
Design System as a
Product
Customer Success
DS teams view the DS as a product.

“
If a team is struggling with
Just like a real-world products, adoption or don't really understand
sometimes the customers need what value it brings, we deliver
hand-holding to succeed in using it.
people from the design system

team to support them in the
Office Hours
conversion.
At Gusto, Amplitude and Disney+
Karolina Boremalm
(Davy’s former team), the design

system teams are running office
hours, to engage with their internal
customers, answer questions and
receive contribution and expansion
“
The team tracks KPI's such as
product usage, quality, shipping,
requests.
and updating and maintaining the

library and documentation, with
Task force
adoption numbers as a way to

At IKEA, the design system team
interpret these metrics.
sends members to support the
teams struggling with adoption.
Davy Fung @ Meta

They provide training sessions,
one-on-one support, and ongoing
collaboration to ensure the team is
able to fully utilize the design
system.
“
At Gusto we treat the DS
like a product consumed
by internal "customers".
We are looking to solve DS
users' problems and
satisfy their needs, like a
product team.
Empathy
Exchange programs
It is called rotation at Gusto and

“
This exchange program has been
exchange program at IKEA. But the very successful as it allows for both
concept is similar.
junior and senior developers to

learn from each other and make
Designers and engineers are being changes to improve the design
sent to the design system team.
system.
Design system members are sent to
Karolina Boremalm
the product teams.
“
This improves information sharing
product teams’ get
accessibility skills and Rotations allow taking part in our
system thinkin rituals and our daily process as a
design system teams get to way of seeing all the considerations
better understand their that go into a component, and also
clients needs.
collecting their feedback on what's

been working for their team and
what hasn't

Social proof
Be visible
The DS team makes an effort to

“
The adoption process began with
“acquire its first customer” and use individual feature teams and the
that customer as a case-study for team offered more support and set
other teams to follow.
an example for other teams to

follow.
When providing support and
education, Lise focuses on doing it Davy Fung @ Meta
in public. So everyone will see the
“
answer, but also become more
confident that support is there
when it’s needed. When a question's asked, we want
to ask in Slack so that we answer it
once, but it's heard by dozens. And
if we have one of these sessions,
we can have multiple people there
at one time, so we're doing hands-
on work with a group.

How to build a winning design system team / Measuring adoption 23
Measuring adoption
Quantitative + Qualitative
“
The approach to measuring the
“
The velocity and the amount of
impact of a design system at changes are probably more
Amplitude involves a combination meaningful metrics than the
of qualitative and quantitative number of used components.
methods.
There are a lot of factors that go
Jack McCloy @ Amplitude into adoption, like the teams
workloads, and what their focus is,
how much legacy code they're
Metrics
working with, and how far off the
old implementation is compared to
1 Number of components used
what is needed to be able to use
2 Percentage of code in the new components.
production coming from the DS
3 Velocity of team using the DS Lise LaTorre @ Gusto

vs teams not using the DS
4 Amount of contributions and

contributors
5 Percentage of the team

members using the DS
How to build a winning design system team / Measuring adoption 24
“
We measure adoption in
terms of how many
components are being
used, how much GitHub
activity we have, and
how much Figma activity
we have.
Karolina Boremalm @ IKEA Retail, Ingka Group
C H A P T E R 4
Governance
“
After two years, a fully staffed design
system team was formed to maintain focus,
clarity and coverage on all the deliverables,
such as libraries, documentation, office
hours, and governance.
Davy Fung @ Meta

How to build a winning design system team / Governance 26
How to manage
changes and
contributions
Collaboration
A key responsibility of the design

“
What we've been seeing is when
system team is to collaborate with people have been really wanting to
designers to identify new deviate, often their use case can be
components and variations that are handled by different components.
being created as part of a new So a lot of times we'll participate
design, and to proactively prepare with them and collaborate and
those components for use. suggest other answers to the
problem they're trying to solve
“
One of the most important things
that do work with the system.

about our approach to the design
system is that we view it as a
collaborative effort between all
teams, not just the design system
team. Therefore, we encourage
open communication and feedback
through channels such as Slack,
GitHub, and office hours.

Preventing technical debt
Factors like accessibility and

“
If something is more risky from an
usability should be considered as a accessibility perspective or from a
component that poses a risk in usability perspective, teams
these areas could lead to more implementing it themselves in their
technical debt in the application if own way is going to create more
implemented in an inconsistent technical debt in the application
way.
“
We welcome contributions from
other teams, but it’s important to
note that this type of work requires
a different skill set and mindset
than what they may be used to. It’s
similar to asking a sprinter to run
a marathon, they may be able to
do it, but it’s not their specialty
and it may not be enjoying it
much.

Expansion
Adding components to the design

“
To add something to the system,
system requires thoughtful the team would need to meet with
consideration. Only if a requirement the cross-functional design system
comes from multiple teams, it is and discuss the potential use
considered to be approved. As across multiple teams. If it is
more teams become interested in deemed useful and can be
creating variations of components, incorporated during their
the oversight and governance will development cycle, the team will
require more work from the design help build it.
and engineering team.
Davy Fung @ Meta
“
If there is a need for a change,
there is often a discussion for why
that change is needed for us to
make a change to the core. There
needs to be a wonderful reason
for why that change should
happen. I would say that 75
percent of the time, maybe even 80
percent of the time we don't make
the change.
Karolina Boremalm

Detach instance - the root of all

evil?
The one thing design system teams

“
We use blueprints as a way to
are try to prevent is teams “going guide teams in building new
rogue”. When teams detach components that are composed of
instances it means they break out smaller chunks that are already
of the system to a place where all part of the system. This way,
rules and guidelines of the system teams have flexibility to meet their
do not apply. To mitigate this , the specific needs while also adhering
design system teams guide teams to the design system.
how to build new components that
adhere to the design systems Lise LaTorre @ Gusto
standards. New components
adhere to standards when they are
composed of system components.
“
Teams can schedule a critique
session with us to go through the
components they build or the
design they built.
Karolina Boremalm

Syncing design and code
The component library that the

“
To ensure that Figma and the code
design team uses (Figma for are in sync, we perform regular
example) and the component audits to compare the code
library in the code side need to be snippets and design components.
in sync. When discrepancies exist
they lead to a huge time sink trying Jack McCloy @ Amplitude
to bridge the gaps. Design system
“
teams make sure the both
component libraries are in sync all
We're always looking for ways to
the time.
improve this process and keep the
libraries in sync.
Ryan Taylor @ Snyk
Syncing Storybook
and Figma
Anima syncs your Figma
and code, automatically.
Book a demo

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Top design system

leaders reveal: How to

We would like to thank all the

e-book. Their participation was vital

Gusto is a comprehensive payroll, benefits, and HR platform for

Meta is a social media and technology company founded by

Snyk provides a software development platform to help

Amplitude provides a product analytics platform that enables

Introduction Let’s learn from industry leaders,

through real-world examples how

to create a design system team

that delivers results.

Whether you're starting from

scratch or looking to improve an

existing team, this book is an

essential resource for anyone

looking to build a winning design

Jack McCloy @ Amplitude

How to get leadership

One effective method of gaining

Ryan Taylor @ Snyk

an AWS Consulting Partner.

Attracting talent Scalability

Having a design system indicate to By using a new Design System,

good product engineers and sparked when a customer tried to

designers expect to work.

If you hire a great designer, and on l

signaling something very specific l

about how your company values

Jack McCloy @ Amplitude

Jack McCloy @ Amplitude

Ryan Taylor @ Snyk Build products faster with

Planting seeds Planning for scale

Having a component library in Design systems may not be

organization's commitment to You don't have to start from a full-

library, that includes only a few

color and typography, can save you

@ IKEA Retail, Ingka Group

How are the best

The scaling formula. At IKEA, Meta

teams are composed of the same

manager on each side). Designer : Developer ratio?

At Meta, the team also includes a

At Snyk, the team is composed of 5

At Amplitude, there is one designer

Davy Fung @ Meta

Getting adoption for a

In some organization there is a

top-level decision to use only Any new products have to be

DS are so clear that the top-level

How to build a winning design system team / Driving adoption 17

DS teams view the DS as a product.

people from the design system

(Davy’s former team), the design

and updating and maintaining the

adoption numbers as a way to

Davy Fung @ Meta

It is called rotation at Gusto and

junior and senior developers to

the product teams.

@ IKEA Retail, Ingka Group

system thinkin rituals and our daily process as a

design system teams get to way of seeing all the considerations

manager on each side).   Designer : Developer ratio?