Design System Office Hours

Davy and PJ talk about how amongst many good engineering traits, the rigor, and ways they work should be more adopted by product designers and specially us, maintainers. If we can track, version, and test our work as rigorously as engineers, we would be in a higher quality bar.

Davy talks special co-host, Guy Segal, about his first month at his new design systems job at Atlassian, and the fun of being a newbie after the first 30 days, when the going really starts getting tough.

Davy and PJ talk about the role of our designers on the ground, we call them our ambassadors. These good eggs not only inform our day-to-day product improvements, but help keep up informed across the org.

Davy with friend of the program, Chela Giraldo talk about their recent experiences looking for a new design systems, and the struggles with developing the "design system portfolio" that can tell our unique stories.

Chela has a recent post about it, which you should check out on Design System Collective.

Davy and PJ discuss the challenges and strategies for design system training, especially when it comes to Figma. We explore the line between providing direct tool training and focusing on how the design system integrates with those tools.

Davy talks about what he's seen with the popularity around (local) product systems and how you can may want to adoption via providing just some design system team support. PJ ends the convo with the lighter weight approach of supporting templates in code and design.

Another takeaway from our cross-functional discussions, how do design system team members handle disagreements with consumers, or even our own teammates?

Davy and PJ talk dive into designers building helpers and plugins to support more specialized design system maintainer workflows, and the beauty of unblocking ourselves.

Davy and PJ talk about how to plan to best support inbound product design work, in addition to the differences between product-led work vs design system team-led initiatives.

Because it was PJ's first Config, we decided to record a live, IRL episode, recap our first thoughts about the new product releases and a thread that we started about who Figma is designing for, dating back from last year's event.