Operating a Workflow to Resolve Designer and Developer Needs — After building for months, Morningstar Design System released in June 2017 and celebrated the launch with our community of designers and developers. Immediately, the community used it. And, immediately, they needed help. What kind of help? Oh my goodness did those requests fly! Fix your defect. Add a feature I…

Decompose Your Workflow into Checklists — Originally published on eightshapes.com. Top-level steps to develop a system feature—from Propose and Design to Code and Doc—are valuable but not enough. Teammates made different assumptions about what’s needed to complete a step. High-level definitions-of-done were helpful. Yet, outputs lacked robustness when smaller substeps were completed inconsistently. …

Higher Quality and More Engagement Require More Steps — As new collaborators engage with a design system for the first time, there are two common, similar objections: There’s so many steps. It’s so long and too complicated. This workflow is far more complicated than how we make things on our team. First off, I recognize and validate their perception…

Leveling up a design system’s multi-channel approach to messaging designers, developers and everyone else — Operating a design system shares much in common with operating any product venture, from developing to supporting to marketing it. With marketing comes communications, spreading messages far and wide to engage designers and developers how they want to be engaged. Addressing their problems. …

Iterate Work with Stories, Epics, Versions, Tasks and More — I really like using Jira. I value the order it brings to the complicated chaos of making, curating, and contributing to design systems. I’m no Jira admin, and I ain’t no certified scrummaster. That said, I’ve brought enough order to design system chaos using Jira to share the durable approaches…

Onboard Step-by-Step So They Build with Confidence — A smooth onboarding is an essential moment in a product experience. That’s why an Getting Started as an Engineer is arguably the most important documentation your system publishes. Engineers want to traverse simple, dependable steps that are quick, effortless, and painless. Getting stuck can be catastrophic. They should plow through…

A Workflow to Design, Build and Document Each Part — Some teams barely organize how things get done. They’ll add a dash of design here, dive deep into code there, and maybe sprinkle on documentation as an afterthought. “Should we make this? What should it be? When do we QA?” For less disciplined teams, who the heck knows. Lacking a…