A Battle to buy-in Leaders & Stakeholder into a Design System Strategy
just another day at the office …
Today it seems almost impossible to work fluid and efficiently without a design system.
For me, as a user experience designer, it was very clear the crucial necessity of such a pragmatic approach to product development. Unfortunately, the same didn’t happen with the higher management parties, even from the engineering side. Sometimes the silos can impress us for the negative, but us UX’s are always ready for a good fight! Right?! It was from the engineering department that raised greater resistance to change. I truly wasn’t expecting such strike from them part, but I never take a war lost by just one battle lose. So, my obvious strategy was speaking numbers, earnings & losses, of implementing such a framework. So, then the story thus began …
Stage 1 — Leaders & Stakeholders Buy-ins
The joy of starting every project by the book is a myth! And sometimes this turns out to be positive because it is through those barriers that we learn to overcome ourselves. Thus, before I could start planning how I could start the project, I had to start to think about how I could achieve a successful buy-in from our internal stakeholder.
First battle
For some time that I follow the amazing philosophy of Atomic Design. I am a big fan of Brand Frost. And I was counting the minutes to have an opportunity to embrace those principles.
In a company where we build software that needs to reflect the organization brand, philosophy, and tom of voice. Currently, nothing makes more sense than a cohesive design system (but apparently, it did not make sense to everyone at first). Nevertheless, at my first opportunity, I present the idea to the engineering head. I was super excited by this new world of opportunities, when suddenly …

I got a really cold bucket of ice! and I was … what just happened? What I did wrong? I wasn’t expecting this outcome! Did I do something wrong on my communication? Weren’t the example clear enough? Did I present something completely unrealistic? So I start to wonder, maybe I miss my communication, perhaps I didn’t spoke the “engineering slang” to make myself clear.
I confess that I was very surprised by the lack of vision from such department. It was supposed to them understand me easier than the management departments.
Second battle
That impression of not made myself clear because of different communication backgrounds stayed into my head. So, I decided to meet with a front-end (our team is really small, I didn’t have too much of a choice, to be just one). I presented the idea to him and for my joy, he already knew what a design system was and it was also into Atomic Design too. He got even more excited than me!!! oh yeah! I felt that I was gathering the right army for this battle!
So, my brilliant (and quickly realized worthless) idea was to make him my front man to speak again with the head of engineering. And present the idea as it came from the front-end team.
I was feeling that this really might work since the front-end department has more weight under the consideration of implementing new frameworks. And then … after the presentation, my fellow front-end colleague came back with the second negative stance:
“We don’t need that! What we do, always have worked for us before”
“We do not have the time and man force to build such thing”
“The time and work needed to invest in such tool doesn’t compensate the effort”
He tried more than one communication but the outcome was always the same. Directly and indirectly, those were the statements around our proposal. I was … wtf! How a technologic company has such short vision or lacking communication to open their mind to other approach or solutions! Technology and innovation should be like a marriage not and casual hangout!

Their battle
Now I was thinking to myself… “What can I do more! … I refused to accept a defeat“. Was time to change the strategy!
If I wasn’t able to reach the engineering department, I decided to change my focus from where the funds and the numbers come from. I made another type of presentation, now not towards technical and development advantages but instead, I focused on the ROI (Return on investment) and add value of such solution into the company saves! Checkmate!!!
My first win!!! I got their attention.
Fourth battle
Now that I had the attention of some significant stakeholders, the next was prepared the engineering department for the upcoming news that higher management wanted to go ahead with my proposed solution. Of course, there was still some resistance, but in the end, they accepted the higher order and start to behave more resilience towards the idea.
Stage 2 — Hands-on
Now I and my team were ready to start! And undoubtedly, to build a design system internally, collaboration was the key.
First battle
Now I was over the top to start put my hand on work. I start spending my time researching about the best solutions and practices for my design system. In a first stage, it was essential to me to understand how I should manage the entire process. But of course, I do not have the expertise to fully understand both sides, especially the programming part side.
So, the first step was to schedule and workshop/meeting with all the intervenient parts of the development process, respectively, designers, front-ends, project managers and engineering to start organizing our future work.
But before this meeting, I carefully prepared the agenda for the workshop in order to be as productive as possible:
AGENDA
- Pitch a strategy — Plan the Design System’s scope:
- What are the possible benefits of building this system?
- What could go wrong?
- How many resources will it take to maintain this system?
- And, what problems are we trying to solve by building this system?
- MVP (Minimum Viable Product) product plan:
- What can we deliverable workable for a short-term deadline? To help with this we will fill the attached document (I will take printed versions to the meeting)
- What are we going to plan for the long-term?
- Zero sprint planning
The workshop:
To start planning our goals I decided to follow Nathan Curtis process to start a Design System.
Each one of us contributed with their vision and sense of prioritization for the project.
In this meeting, the front-end defined which technology they wanted to implement the design system. At by the end, it was defined it will be on a React Storybook. It also was defined to use the DSM Invision tool for supporting documentation and collaboration between the team.


After completing every step of the template we gather the information in an Impact / Effort Matrix Canvas.

The workshop was a success. A lot of communication and meaningful debates. In this first workshop, we developed a “working wall” where everyone could communicate and share their perspectives to the team, creating an open and collaborative design process. Here, the contributions of everyone were welcome and valued (especially with food! the best way to buy your teammates towards your goals. No one will be grumpy with a full stomach). In the end, through this “working wall” we were able to exploit business and project goals as well as design principles. In a mood board, we also explore and shared references to other Design Systems where we could learn from, like screengrabs/photos and links.
I was very pleased with the outcomes of that meeting.
Second battle
Higher you dream, higher the fall, if the case. And it was! Nothing in my path has been simple. And that’s why I am so resilience as well.
At the beginning of this journey, I didn’t accept the engineering arguments to dispose of my proposal, but I can’t deny some of their concerns had purposes. And one of them was:
“We do not have the time and man force to build such thing”
We are a small team, with too many projects and too fewer people to manage them all. So, there was the harbinger of hard times! Damn it again! I quickly understood that we couldn’t build a project from scratch. We are too few to have time (and more importantly life after work!) to balance between projects and having an extra major effort on our backs.
I had to take the rabbit out of the hat, again!
And as so many developer fellows, Github save my life!

I start to look for open source frameworks with Apache License 2.0 that accept to be:
- Commercial use
- Modification
- Distribution
- Patent use
- Private use
So magic happens! In a glancing moment, I meet IBM Carbon Design System Storybook.

No more battles
After all these ups and downs, was finally time to put hands-on on work! Now, me and my team we are working on this amazing tool. IBM save our lives in this matter. With such a small team and with so limited resources we could do better. So, we are focused on evolving and adapting this tool to our internal needs, so we can start to design for scale. To do that, I periodic organize meetings/workshops as well as pair design with colleagues in order to promote a reach and meaningful design process. But still a working in progress product.
In the end, it was a great experience for me, go through that process. This taught me a lot.
