How to Start: Design Systems at a Startup
Part 1 of strategies and processes for gradually building a design system when you don’t have the resources
In the world of design and engineering, design systems have become increasingly popular and essential to design processes everywhere. Figma has not only increased its tools for creating and maintaining these systems, but recently hosted Schema, a conference dedicated to this topic, with speakers from major companies like Google, Asana, Netflix, and Lyft. You can also easily find great resources about getting buy-in from stakeholders company-wide, starting a design system team, auditing your current product, and creating system processes.
But…how can a small team implement and maintain a design system at a startup where resources and time are limited? As a product designer who got the green light from her team to axe their old Figma library and create a fresh start for the team alongside my other work, it was easy to listen to these big companies and feel disheartened. They have teams of designers and engineers who are dedicated to maintaining, testing, and adding to a design system that is used throughout their products.
To help others that may find themselves in this position, I wanted to share how we scoped what our team could realistically create and maintain to make progress towards a design system.
Start with “why”
Why is working towards a design system important at our startup?
- Automate the things we don’t want to spend time on and allow us to focus this time on exploration and creating new features faster
- Quickly iterate, scale, and make changes
- Be consistent, organized, intentional, which in turn sets our engineers up for success
Understand your team’s needs, and separate them from the wants
Most designers and engineers want a robust design system, but while working at a smaller company, is that what they actually need?
- Our product is rapidly growing and changing–we are actively exploring, designing, and changing designs for new use cases. While we wanted a translated design system fully engineered in our app, we needed a flexible, useable library in Figma to allow us to quickly make changes and updates.
- While we wanted to use the atomic design structure, we quickly found that we needed a more contextual organization structure for our new library.
- In order to maintain work towards our design system, we needed to have a library-first approach, instead of adding components as an afterthought.
Be realistic about resource and time availability
Who will be involved in the project and how much time can they dedicate to it?
We’re in a really exciting period of growth and it’s important that we are spending the majority of our time as a team designing and building new features and iterating on existing features to meet our users’ needs. Because of this, we decided that working towards a design system would be an internal project for the design team.
We have a small team of 5 product designers whose time is spent researching, exploring, iterating on, and polishing designs. Any time spent on the design system is time we are not spending pushing a feature forward–realistically, we found that we could dedicate 1–2 designers for 4–5 hours per week.
Make a plan
By walking through these questions, we had a better understanding of what working towards a design system looked like for our team and we were able to break this into tangible steps:
- Implement a design library-first process that accounts for our 1–2 designers’ time availability
- Restructure our Figma library to have a more contextual approach
- Have next steps figured out, even if they won’t happen for a while
Remember, design systems do not happen overnight, but you don’t have to let a lack of resources hold you back from working towards one. The best way to tackle these kinds of complex problems is by starting small, taking it slow, and gradually building from there.
Read Part two! Process: Design Systems at a Startup 💥
