Design System Office Hours

We're back with an episode an episode about component and design system flexibility. How opinionated should your design system be, vs a large set of reusable pieces that can be put in any which way together. Davy and PJ weigh in on both methods and where you may want to dive into a framework that allows you to build starting from anywhere.

Our friend Guy Segal, Director of Design Systems at Thomson Reuters comes and talks with us about consistency in operations and how to scale out systems thinking.

We learn about PJ's start in design systems, dating back to 2011, and Davy's first introduction to it in 2015. They discuss while tech has evolved, aspects such as theming still remain a struggle to figure out. Also discussed is how we evolved our roles, and what might be suitable traits and tactics used by design system people in 2025.

Davy and PJ talk about design and code parity, how we keep our artifacts aligned with live product, and other nuances to maintaining large scale component libraries.

Davy and PJ talk about the challenges of updating legacy components from yesteryear, and what it takes to migrate legacy code to new design system components. When is the suitable time to do this work?

Davy and PJ talk about the concepts presented in Brad Frost's 2013 book, Atomic Design, and how a simpler format in present day with components, patterns, and screens may be common representation for design teams.

In our second recent episode about reviewing work, Davy and PJ talk about how we review output from product designers on our teams and the need to stay plugged in so we can help designers earlier in the process.

While the podcast is one form of communication, on our teams we heavily utilize async written communication methods to best spread the good work of design systems. We talk about the different methods we communicate to stakeholders and consumers of our design system artifacts, specifically, documentation.

Davy and PJ dive into the various ways we've utilized crits on our teams to both do design ops related work, but also reviewing code, in addition to design.

Topical for the time of year, Davy gets PJ to spill some beans on how to best set up designers to best prove the value of their day-to-day work in design systems.