Email Design Systems: Part 2 — Identify a Champion

continued from Email Design Systems: Part 1 — Identify Email Stakeholders

Identifying a champion for the Email Design System (EDS) will be crucial to its creation and future success.

There are a few boxes a potential champion should check before taking the next step. Are they excited about design systems? Do they have a clear vision of the benefits of an EDS? Are they ready to roll up their sleeves to put in the time and work to establish, maintain and evolve an EDS? If the answer to all three is “yes,” then you may have found your champion. If you’re lucky, perhaps you’ll even have several suitable champions willing to contribute.

If the right one isn’t in reach, your resources may be much more limited. But that doesn’t mean you should quit! Even you, as the single champion, can still get the ball rolling.

But, let’s be clear, you’re going to be wearing a lot of hats as a champion of the EDS: coordinator, product manager (yes, product not project — more on that in a later entry), email developer, email designer, instructor, potentially a dash of UX designer and, finally, evangelist.

Why evangelist? Because in order for an EDS to be successful, the team must be fully on board. Otherwise it will go unused and perhaps abandoned all-together.

According to the Sparkbox 2019 Design Systems Survey, the top reason a design system was not successful was due to adoption difficulties:

That’s why Part 1 of this series says to identify stakeholders.

You can have a team of great champions, but your EDS isn’t going to get far without a clear list of stakeholders who will ultimately be the users of the design system. The champion(s) will need to lead the evangelism of an EDS to these stakeholders and support them.

Champions should be in close contact with stakeholders to discuss pain points and how the EDS will address those pain points. This part of the process will better inform decision-making while creating the design system itself, increase confidence and trust among the team (maybe even stir up excitement) and help prepare the team for changes they will see in their workflow once the EDS is launched, contributing to improved adoption.

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Next step coming soon: Email Design Systems: Part 3 — Audit Emails